Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

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.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!

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.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen - The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

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

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

La' , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute , Luxe, calme et volupte . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

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.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

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

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.

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

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.

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

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.