Charles Baudelaire

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

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

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.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

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.

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

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.

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.

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.