Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Nothing can be done except little by little.

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.

We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas w...

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but tw...

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

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

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. L...

The beautiful is always bizarre.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and ye...

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively...

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be h...

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the di...

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who ...

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with...

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

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

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and ...

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit ...

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The ...

Music fathoms the sky.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

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

In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre ...

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed w...

Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win ...

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

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded...

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

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each othe...

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

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, b...

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of i...

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

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your broth...

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work that disagree...

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in ...

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other ...

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

The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that he can sl...

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would ...

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparab...

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

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On ...

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—...

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some fu...

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautifu...

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelair...

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill...

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up o...

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through ...

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite...

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without s...

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitud...

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

The Beautiful is always strange.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxi...

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiratio...

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.

He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

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

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone repl...

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has n...

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they...

As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely neces...

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry o...

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essen...

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky...

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising,...

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are inter...

On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident ...

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion t...

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,That fair, sweet, summer morn!At a turn in the path a...

I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,...

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, i...

And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in t...

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back awa...

SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Q...

Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme...

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy ...