Charles Baudelaire
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.Collection: Space
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.Collection: Brainy
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Poetry
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.Collection: Happiness
Inspiration comes of working every day.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Religion
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.Collection: Beauty
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.Collection: Business
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Art
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Men
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Art
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.Collection: Music
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.Collection: Food
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.Collection: Change
Always be a poet, even in prose.Collection: Poetry
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Poetry
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.Collection: Art
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.Collection: Communication
Music fathoms the sky.Collection: Music
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Poetry
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
We are all born marked for evil.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
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.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
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.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
Everything for me becomes allegory.
There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.