Charles Baudelaire quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

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

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

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.

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

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

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.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

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

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.

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

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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.

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.

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

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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

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.

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

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

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?"

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.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.

Everything for me becomes allegory

When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

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.

The poet is like the prince of clouds Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer; Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.

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

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

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!

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.

In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

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

The beautiful is always bizarre.

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

Delacroix , Wagner , Baudelaire all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject man's nervous and psychic being.

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.

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

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

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

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.

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

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

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.

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

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

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.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Music fathoms the sky.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

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.

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

Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.

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

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

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

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.

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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

La volupte unique et supre" me de l'amour g|"t dans la certitude de faire le mal. The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.

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

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

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

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

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

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 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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.

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.