Charles Baudelaire
The world progresses only through misunderstanding.Collection: Progress
I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.Collection: Butterfly
What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!Collection: Beautiful
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.Collection: Mean
Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.Collection: Artist
For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.Collection: Beauty
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.Collection: Simple
All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.Collection: Shops
To be a great man and a saint to oneself, that's the only important thing.Collection: Men
I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!Collection: Love
My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.Collection: Heart
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.Collection: Running
Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household.Collection: Strong
The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.Collection: Hanging On
I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.Collection: Wind
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.Collection: Art
The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.Collection: Habit
Everything for me becomes allegoryCollection: Allegory
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.Collection: Spiritual
An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.Collection: Inspiring
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.Collection: Giving
Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.Collection: Love
The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.Collection: Archer
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.Collection: Work
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.Collection: Love
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.Collection: Inspirational
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.Collection: Nature
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.Collection: Art
How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.Collection: Work
The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.Collection: Knowing
Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.Collection: Church
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!Collection: Forever
On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.Collection: Self
It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.Collection: Beauty
...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.Collection: Flames
One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.Collection: Boredom
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.Collection: Desire
It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.Collection: Proud
Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.Collection: Wind
In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful.Collection: Sweet
It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us danceCollection: Devil
The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.Collection: Running
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.Collection: Summer
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.Collection: Art
In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.Collection: Art
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.Collection: Fashion
A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.Collection: Hate
Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.Collection: Mold
Everything, alas, is an abyss, actions, desires, dreams, words!Collection: Dream