Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

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

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

We are all born marked for evil.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

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.