Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

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

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Music fathoms the sky.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

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

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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

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

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 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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

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.

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.