Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

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

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.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

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

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

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

La volupte unique et supre" me de l'amour g|"t dans la certitude de faire le mal. The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: Let's go!

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.