Charles Baudelaire Quotes

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified

Today I felt pass over me / A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we're indifferent to whether we win or lose?

I love the clouds ... the clouds that pass by ... over there ... over there ... those lovely clouds!

What is art? Prostitution.

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

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.

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.

Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household ...

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life.

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

God is a scandal, - a profitable scandal.

An industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness ... Love should be love.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires
Sisyphean patience for its song,
Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short
and Art is long.

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it

Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

A Dandy does nothing.

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

I am the vampire at my own veins.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.

No man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward.

The People adore authority.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my primitive passion).

Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.

And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world.

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

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.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

And over your unconsecrated head
you'll hear the howling wolves
lament their fate and yours the livelong year;

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

I am but little disposed to put things in writing. One almost always regrets doing so.

Only when we drink poison are we well.

Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Nature ... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

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.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.