Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Everything for me becomes allegory.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

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.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

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

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.