Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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.
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.
It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.
Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
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.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
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!
The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.
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.
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.
Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.
It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.
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.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work
