Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

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.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

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?

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!

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

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.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

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.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

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.

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

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.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

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.

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

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!