Charles Baudelaire
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
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.
What is art? Prostitution.
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.
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
The beautiful is always bizarre.Collection: Beautiful
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.Collection: Oasis
Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.Collection: Artist
There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.Collection: Inspire
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.Collection: Ephemeral
The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.Collection: Life
A multitude of small delights constitute happinessCollection: Happiness
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.Collection: Ingredients
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.Collection: Wine
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?Collection: Damnation
Evil comes up softly like a flower.Collection: Flower
To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.Collection: Running
One can only forget about time by making use of it.Collection: Inspirational
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.Collection: Men
There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.Collection: Strong
Always be drunk ... Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.Collection: Drunk
I am the vampire at my own veins.Collection: Vampire
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.Collection: Best Love
It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.Collection: Beautiful
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.Collection: Childhood
The People adore authority.Collection: People
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.Collection: Believe
Life swarms with innocent monsters.Collection: Monsters
Discover day to day excitement.Collection: Excitement
Remembering is only a new form of suffering.Collection: Suffering
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?Collection: Winning
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.Collection: Beauty
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in musicCollection: Dancing
A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.Collection: Art
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.Collection: Love
We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.Collection: Women
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.Collection: Drinking
A silent mouth is sweet to hear.Collection: Sweet
Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.Collection: Children
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.Collection: Essentials
Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.Collection: Writing
Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.Collection: Indispensable
Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.Collection: Echoes