Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

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.

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.

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.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

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

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

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.

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.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

What is art? Prostitution.

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.

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.