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Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it -- Charles Baudelaire
Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, And cast God down upon the earth! -- Charles Baudelaire
Lost in this awful world, rubbing shoulders with the multitudes, I am like a tired man whose eye can't see behind him, in the deep years, anything but disillusion and bitterness, and in front of him, nothing but a storm which contains nothing new, neither learning nor pain. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace. -- Charles Baudelaire
A work of art should be like a well-planned crime. -- Charles Baudelaire
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage. -- Charles Baudelaire
Certes, je sortirai quant a' moi satisfait D'un monde o u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust. -- Charles Baudelaire
The Beautiful is always strange. -- Charles Baudelaire
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work -- Charles Baudelaire
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches. -- Charles Baudelaire
With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk. -- Charles Baudelaire
Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet. -- Charles Baudelaire
In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful.. -- Charles Baudelaire
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute. -- Charles Baudelaire
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine. -- Charles Baudelaire
Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother! -- Charles Baudelaire
The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal. -- Charles Baudelaire
Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it. -- Charles Baudelaire
Il faut travailler sinon par go u t, au moins par de sespoir, puisque, tout bien ve rifie , travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser. We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement. -- Charles Baudelaire
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. -- Charles Baudelaire
What is it that brings on these moods of yours?
Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive. -- Charles Baudelaire
The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight. -- Charles Baudelaire
Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am but little disposed to put things in writing. One almost always regrets doing so. -- Charles Baudelaire
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well. -- Charles Baudelaire
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force. -- Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. -- Charles Baudelaire
He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am the wound and the knife!
I am the slap and the cheek!
I am the limbs and the rack,
And the victim and the executioner!
I am the vampire of my own heart. -- Charles Baudelaire
A Dandy does nothing. -- Charles Baudelaire
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul. -- Charles Baudelaire
Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution. -- Charles Baudelaire
One can only forget about time by making use of it. -- Charles Baudelaire
Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently. -- Charles Baudelaire
A tender heart unnerved by nothingness
hoards every fragment of the radiant past. -- Charles Baudelaire
What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes. -- Charles Baudelaire
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense. -- Charles Baudelaire
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du NOUVEAU! (rough translation : Into the abyss
Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make? / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!) -- Charles Baudelaire
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. -- Charles Baudelaire
I lived for a long time under vast porticos
That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires,
And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous
In the evening made seem like basaltic caves. -- Charles Baudelaire
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end. -- Charles Baudelaire
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! -- Charles Baudelaire
He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight - Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things! -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we're indifferent to whether we win or lose? -- Charles Baudelaire
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play,
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet. -- Charles Baudelaire
All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end. -- Charles Baudelaire
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Everything, alas, is an abyss, - actions, desires, dreams, words! -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? -- Charles Baudelaire
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. -- Charles Baudelaire
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart). -- Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep. -- Charles Baudelaire
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious. -- Charles Baudelaire
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
And the lamp having at last resigned itself to death.
There was nothing now but firelight in the room,
And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath
It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom. -- Charles Baudelaire
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. -- Charles Baudelaire
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. -- Charles Baudelaire
The People adore authority. -- Charles Baudelaire
Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind. -- Charles Baudelaire
All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Nothing can be done except little by little. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. -- Charles Baudelaire
How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,
To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir. -- Charles Baudelaire
The priest is immense because he makes others believe in a heap of weird things. The Church wanting to do everything and be everything: it is a law of human spirit. Peoples adore authority. Priests are the servants and followers of imagination. The throne and the altar: revolutionary maxim. -- Charles Baudelaire
Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires
Sisyphean patience for its song,
Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short
and Art is long. -- Charles Baudelaire
Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty. -- Charles Baudelaire
But how you'd please me, night! without those stars
Whose light speaks in a language I have known!
Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare! -- Charles Baudelaire
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things. -- Charles Baudelaire
My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it. -- Charles Baudelaire
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know. -- Charles Baudelaire
Angel full of gaiety, do you know anguish? Angel -- Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will. -- Charles Baudelaire
A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It's a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. -- Charles Baudelaire
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for. -- Charles Baudelaire
Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red. -- Charles Baudelaire
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants. -- Charles Baudelaire
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? -- Charles Baudelaire
If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures. -- Charles Baudelaire
So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love. -- Charles Baudelaire
How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other! -- Charles Baudelaire
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed. -- Charles Baudelaire
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination. -- Charles Baudelaire
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases. -- Charles Baudelaire
Inspiration comes of working every day. -- Charles Baudelaire
Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The world only goes round by misunderstanding. -- Charles Baudelaire
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Thanks be to God, Who gives us suffering
as sacred remedy for all our sins,
that best and purest essence which prepares
the strong in spirit for divine delights! -- Charles Baudelaire
No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare. -- Charles Baudelaire
Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
-- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist. -- Charles Baudelaire
The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror. -- Charles Baudelaire
In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them. -- Charles Baudelaire
To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another; the artist never emerges from himself. -- Charles Baudelaire
Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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! -- Charles Baudelaire
Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times. -- Charles Baudelaire
Poe's drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world. -- Charles Baudelaire
A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned. -- Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art. -- Charles Baudelaire
Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved. -- Charles Baudelaire
What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil. -- Charles Baudelaire
God is a scandal, - a profitable scandal. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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! -- Charles Baudelaire
Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers. -- Charles Baudelaire
Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous. -- Charles Baudelaire
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! -- Charles Baudelaire
Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. -- Charles Baudelaire
Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again
lazy people. -- Charles Baudelaire
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty. -- Charles Baudelaire
Regarding sleep, this sinister adventure of each night, one could say that people fall asleep daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we didn't know that it results from their being oblivious of danger. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Your eyes, brilliant as shop windows Or as blazing lamp-stands at public festivals, Insolently use a borrowed power Without ever knowing the law of their beauty. Blind, -- Charles Baudelaire
Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams. -- Charles Baudelaire
Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist. -- Charles Baudelaire
Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house? -- Charles Baudelaire
Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling. -- Charles Baudelaire
La' , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute , Luxe, calme et volupte . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous. -- Charles Baudelaire
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 an essential part and characteristic of beauty. -- 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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror. -- Charles Baudelaire
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. -- Charles Baudelaire
By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization. -- Charles Baudelaire
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. -- Charles Baudelaire
Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts,
Which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart -- Charles Baudelaire
My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music. -- Charles Baudelaire
There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself. -- Charles Baudelaire
Music pierces the sky. -- Charles Baudelaire
A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk. -- Charles Baudelaire
I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God?
The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Even when she walks one would believe that she dances. -- Charles Baudelaire
Quand me" me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e" tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me" me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist. -- Charles Baudelaire
The mainspring of genius is curiosity. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait. -- Charles Baudelaire
That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing. -- Charles Baudelaire
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight? -- Charles Baudelaire
I love the clouds ... the clouds that pass by ... over there ... over there ... those lovely clouds! -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery. -- Charles Baudelaire
We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us. -- Charles Baudelaire
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle. -- Charles Baudelaire
Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even serene in its passion. - Regions of pure Poetry. -- Charles Baudelaire
In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born. -- Charles Baudelaire
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy. -- Charles Baudelaire
Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. -- Charles Baudelaire
When it meows, one scarcely hears it ... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies. -- Charles Baudelaire
Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities. -- Charles Baudelaire
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. -- Charles Baudelaire
The child, in love with prints and maps,
Holds the whole world in his vast appetite.
How large the earth is under the lamplight!
But in the eyes of memory, how the world is cramped! -- Charles Baudelaire
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. -- Charles Baudelaire
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated. -- Charles Baudelaire
In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk! -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness. -- Charles Baudelaire
Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary. -- Charles Baudelaire
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery. -- Charles Baudelaire
And over your unconsecrated head
you'll hear the howling wolves
lament their fate and yours the livelong year; -- Charles Baudelaire
Listen, my dear-- with soft step the night hears. -- Charles Baudelaire
Everything for me becomes allegory. -- Charles Baudelaire
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite. -- Charles Baudelaire
Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois. -- Charles Baudelaire
And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world. -- Charles Baudelaire
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness. -- Charles Baudelaire
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 -- Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing. -- Charles Baudelaire
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful! -- Charles Baudelaire
Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable. -- Charles Baudelaire
However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it. -- Charles Baudelaire
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice. -- Charles Baudelaire
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. -- Charles Baudelaire
But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am? -- Charles Baudelaire
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized. -- Charles Baudelaire
What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad! -- Charles Baudelaire
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character. -- Charles Baudelaire
Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten! -- Charles Baudelaire
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around. -- Charles Baudelaire
There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'. -- Charles Baudelaire
This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy. -- Charles Baudelaire
Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified -- Charles Baudelaire
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it. -- Charles Baudelaire
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise. -- Charles Baudelaire
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton. -- Charles Baudelaire
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness ... Love should be love. -- Charles Baudelaire
The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear. -- Charles Baudelaire
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life. -- Charles Baudelaire
From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren,
What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes,
Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen -
The universe less hideous, each moment less strained? -- Charles Baudelaire
The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear. -- Charles Baudelaire
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! -- Charles Baudelaire
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. -- Charles Baudelaire
An industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art. -- Charles Baudelaire
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling. -- Charles Baudelaire
If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible. -- Charles Baudelaire
A silent mouth is sweet to hear. -- Charles Baudelaire
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. -- Charles Baudelaire
Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally. -- Charles Baudelaire
Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin. -- Charles Baudelaire
Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite. -- Charles Baudelaire
Music fathoms the sky. -- Charles Baudelaire
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men. -- Charles Baudelaire
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. -- Charles Baudelaire
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing. -- Charles Baudelaire
Always be a poet, even in prose. -- Charles Baudelaire
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. -- Charles Baudelaire
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge. -- Charles Baudelaire
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;
and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst. -- Charles Baudelaire
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality. -- Charles Baudelaire
There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
The beautiful is always bizarre. -- Charles Baudelaire
When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you! -- Charles Baudelaire
Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets. -- Charles Baudelaire
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them. -- Charles Baudelaire
We are all born marked for evil. -- Charles Baudelaire
The world progresses only through misunderstanding. -- Charles Baudelaire
What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties! -- Charles Baudelaire
I know that pain is the one nobility / upon which Hell itself cannot encroach -- Charles Baudelaire
The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future. -- Charles Baudelaire
Always be drunk ... Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk. -- Charles Baudelaire
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses. -- Charles Baudelaire
A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.. -- Charles Baudelaire
What is art? Prostitution. -- Charles Baudelaire
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. -- Charles Baudelaire
A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will. -- Charles Baudelaire
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! -- Charles Baudelaire
The Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love -- Charles Baudelaire
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed. -- Charles Baudelaire
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist. -- Charles Baudelaire
Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace. -- Charles Baudelaire
We revel in the laxness of the path we take. -- Charles Baudelaire
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror. -- Charles Baudelaire
I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives? -- Charles Baudelaire
Through the Unknown, we'll find the New -- Charles Baudelaire
Remembering is only a new form of suffering. -- Charles Baudelaire
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste. -- Charles Baudelaire
To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my primitive passion). -- Charles Baudelaire
Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious. -- Charles Baudelaire
Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will. -- Charles Baudelaire
Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it. -- Charles Baudelaire
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. -- Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. -- Charles Baudelaire
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial. -- Charles Baudelaire
The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief. -- Charles Baudelaire
On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there. -- Charles Baudelaire
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
Only when we drink poison are we well. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man. -- Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recalled at will. -- Charles Baudelaire
Progress, this great heresy of decay. -- Charles Baudelaire
For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty. -- Charles Baudelaire
So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk. -- Charles Baudelaire
A study of the Great Malady; horror of home. -- Charles Baudelaire
It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs. -- Charles Baudelaire
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. -- Charles Baudelaire
No man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward. -- Charles Baudelaire
Go then, a starveling girl
With no perfume or pearls,
Only your nudity
O my beauty! -- Charles Baudelaire
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music -- Charles Baudelaire
Eternal superiority of the Dandy.
What is the Dandy? -- Charles Baudelaire
He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window. -- Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recovered at will. -- Charles Baudelaire
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things. -- Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. -- Charles Baudelaire
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not. -- Charles Baudelaire
The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling ... and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'. -- Charles Baudelaire
Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household ... -- Charles Baudelaire
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window. -- Charles Baudelaire
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes. -- Charles Baudelaire
I am the vampire at my own veins. -- Charles Baudelaire
Evil comes up softly like a flower. -- Charles Baudelaire
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. -- Charles Baudelaire
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation. -- Charles Baudelaire
Today I felt pass over me / A breath of wind from the wings of madness. -- Charles Baudelaire
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral. -- Charles Baudelaire
You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed. -- Charles Baudelaire
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness -- Charles Baudelaire
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves? -- Charles Baudelaire
Nature ... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest. -- Charles Baudelaire
