Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

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.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Music fathoms the sky.

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.

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

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.

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.