Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

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

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

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

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

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

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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.

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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

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

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.

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

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

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.

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

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

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