Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

Progress, that great heresy of degenerates.

What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.

These tall and handsome ships, swaying imperceptibly on tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with their inactive, nostalgic appearance, dont they say to us in a speechless tongue: When do we cast off for happiness?

To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign. Whatever is created by the spirit is more alive than matter.

To do one's duty every day and trust in God for tomorrow.

It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other. If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.

Women do not know how to separate the soul from the body.

I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What talk can they have with God?

Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

To be a serviceable man has always seemed to me something quite repulsive.

A woman is natural: that is to say, abominable.

Perhaps it would be sweet to be, in turn, both victim and executioner.

Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.

The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.

Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material.

The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes so embarrassing that I suffered, upon losing it, a little less emotion than if I had mislaid, while out on a stroll, my calling-card.

He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Superstition is the reservoir of all truths.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters.... But with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.

It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.