Charles Baudelaire Quotes

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music fathoms the sky.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

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

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

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

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.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

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.

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

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

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

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 center 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.

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

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

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

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.

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

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.