Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.