Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

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.

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

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

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.

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.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

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.

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.