Top 50 Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

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

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

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

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

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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

We are all born marked for evil.

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

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

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

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

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.

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.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

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

What is art? Prostitution.

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.

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

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

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

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

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

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

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

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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

Even if it were proven that God didn’t exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

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.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

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