Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

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

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men

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

"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."

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

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

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

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

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.

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

These beings have no other profession than to cultivate the idea of beauty in their person, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think.

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

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

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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

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 disproportions.

I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.

This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.

The Revolution had been made by voluptuaries.

All great poets become naturally, fatally, critics.