Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
Everything for me becomes allegory.
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
Music fathoms the sky.
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
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.
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.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
We are all born marked for evil.
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
