Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

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

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

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

What is that sad, dark island?—It is Cythera,They tell us, a country famous in song,Banal Eldorado of all the old bachelors.Look! after all, it is a poor land!

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

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Be charming, and shut up!

Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk — on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

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.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

The devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.