Quotes from baudelaire charles iii

Sudden as a knife you thrust into my sorry heart and strong as a host of demons came, gaudy and libertine, to make in my corrupted mind your bed and bedlam there; Beast, who bind me to you close as convict to his chains.

The misery of the cuckold. It springs from his pride, from a false conception of honor and of happiness, and from a love foolishly turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It is ever the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.

An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty -- a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.

Nature is a temple where living pillars Sometimes emit confused words; There man passes through the forests of symbols Which observe him with familiar looks.

There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day.

It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

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.

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.

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.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

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

Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams, Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!

He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.

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.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Come back, I beg you, and I shall be gentle and modest in my desires.... I won't say you'll find me no longer in love, but you cannot prevent my mind wandering around your arms, those beautiful hands of yours, your eyes which are the mainspring of life, and all your adorable earthly being. No, I know you cannot prevent it: but fear not, you are for me an object of worship, and I am incapable of defiling you.

Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.

The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.