150 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Nothing can be done except little by little.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

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

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

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

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

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.

Music fathoms the sky.

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

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

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

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True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.

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.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

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

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

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

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

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

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

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

Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

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

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.

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

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

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

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Everything for me becomes allegory

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.

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

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.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.

Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

A silent mouth is sweet to hear.

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

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.

Discover day to day excitement.

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

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

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

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

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

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!

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

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.

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

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

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.

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.

The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

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

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.

Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.

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

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

What is art? Prostitution.

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

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.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

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.

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

The People adore authority.

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

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

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

The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

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

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

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

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

It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!

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

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

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

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

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

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.

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

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

You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?

Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom

Strangeness is an ingredient necessary in beauty.

Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.

If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!

As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always the product of skill.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

We are all born marked for evil.

When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

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

To be a great man and a saint to oneself, that's the only important thing.

Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.

The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.

It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!