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.

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.

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

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.

The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of Number

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

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

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.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

Always be drunk ... Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.

What is art? Prostitution.

When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.

In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful..

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

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

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

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

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

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.

the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love

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.