Quotes from baudelaire charles iv

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

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

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

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.

Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint.

When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.

To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.

Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness; Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!

The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.