Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you ; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

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

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.

And yet to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself; and in the wasteland of desire your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"—Charles Baudelaire "The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy"—Ken Ammi

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.

Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.

The Beautiful is always strange.

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

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate's immortal loom

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

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté Luxe, calme et volupté There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Ne cherchez plus mon cÅ"ur; des monstres l'ont mangé.

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases. - A Carcass