Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.