Charles Baudelaire
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.Collection: Independent
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!Collection: Beautiful
Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.Collection: Beauty
Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.Collection: Morning
L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.Collection: Queens
Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.Collection: Children
What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.Collection: Love Is
But a dandy can never be a vulgar manCollection: Men
the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we loveCollection: Moving
Quand me" me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e" tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me" me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.Collection: Needs
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.Collection: Photography
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.Collection: Spring
What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!Collection: Queens
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.Collection: Archer
I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?Collection: Seeds
Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.Collection: Mean
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.Collection: Morning
J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans. IhavemorememoriesthanifIwereonethousandyearsold.Collection: Souvenirs
Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique O u' ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers. I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach.Collection: Pain
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.Collection: Happiness
Il faut travailler sinon par go u" t, au moins par de sespoir, puisque, tout bien ve rifie , travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser. We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement.Collection: Despair
Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.Collection: Men
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.Collection: Laughter
My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.Collection: Summer
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.Collection: Lying
A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.Collection: Home
Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.Collection: Strong
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.Collection: Wise
If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?Collection: Believe
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.Collection: Writing
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.Collection: Photography
By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.Collection: Knowledge
Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing.Collection: Men
What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.Collection: Love
It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.Collection: Regret
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.Collection: Eye
My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being presentCollection: Artist
A Dandy does nothing.Collection: Doe
If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.Collection: Beautiful
If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.Collection: Firsts
In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful...Collection: Strong