Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

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 dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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

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.

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

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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.

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

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

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.