Charles Baudelaire Quotations

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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 dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

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

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

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

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

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

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

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

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

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

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

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

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

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

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.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

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

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.

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

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

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

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

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

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

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

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

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

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

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

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

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

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

I am swimming in dishonor like a fish in water.

Here is the charming evening, the criminal's friend. It comes like an accomplice, with stealthy tread.

Listen, my darling, listen to soft night approaching.

To lepers and to outcasts thou dost show - that passion is the paradise below

Everything for me becomes allegory

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

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

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

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.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalite ; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always a product of art.

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.

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.