Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

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.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

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

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

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.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

What is art? Prostitution.

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

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.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.