Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
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.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
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.
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.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
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.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
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.
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
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.
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.