Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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

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

I am the vampire at my own veins.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

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!

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

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

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

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

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

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.

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

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

To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

Wine transforms moles into eagles.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

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.

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

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.