Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything for me becomes allegory.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Progress, this great heresy of decay.