Quotes By Charles Baudelaire

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

We are all born marked for evil.

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.

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.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.