Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

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

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

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

La' , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute , Luxe, calme et volupte . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.

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.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work that disagreeable thing is the only way of not suffering in life or at all events of suffering less.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always the product of skill.

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if were indifferent to whether we win or lose?

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

Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.

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

Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.

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