Charles Baudelaire's Quotes

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.