Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

The beautiful is always bizarre.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

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.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

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

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

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

Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u" t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.