Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.

The poet is like the prince of the cloudsWho haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,His giant wings prevent him from walking.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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

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.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses.

Perfumes, colors and sounds echo one another.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.

Here is the charming evening, the criminal's friend;It comes like an accomplice, with stealthy tread.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

This life is a hospital, where each patient is possessed by a desire to change beds.

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

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.