Charles Baudelaire
Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.Collection: Childhood
I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.Collection: Moon
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.Collection: Rivers
Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.Collection: Funny
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.Collection: Biographies
There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.Collection: Practice
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.Collection: Mean
Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.Collection: Civilization
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.Collection: Lying
The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.Collection: Beauty
Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.Collection: Dream
My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.Collection: Music
It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.Collection: Beautiful
Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.Collection: Photography
The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.Collection: Lying
Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!Collection: Food
Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.Collection: Summer
Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.Collection: Love
Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.Collection: Art
All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.Collection: Drawing
I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.Collection: Summer
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.Collection: Country
Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.Collection: Wine
When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.Collection: Cat
I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.Collection: Summer
Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be" tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it.Collection: Heart
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.Collection: Men
A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.Collection: Party
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.Collection: Moving
Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!Collection: Morning
Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.Collection: Epic
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.Collection: Dream
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.Collection: Men
You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?Collection: Believe
If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.Collection: Believe
Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u" t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.Collection: Heart
My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!Collection: Brother
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.Collection: Fashion
La' , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute , Luxe, calme et volupte . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.Collection: Order
The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.Collection: Ants
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loomCollection: Fate
The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.Collection: Stars
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.Collection: Views
Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.Collection: Wind
Wine transforms moles into eagles.Collection: Wine