Words matter. These are the best Charles Baudelaire Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
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.
Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
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.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
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.
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
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 priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
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.
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Everything for me becomes allegory.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
What is art? Prostitution.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
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.
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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.
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.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
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.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.
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.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
