Explore Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

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

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

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.

If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.

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!

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.

How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,_x000D__x000D_To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,_x000D__x000D_As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,_x000D__x000D_Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.

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

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

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

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

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.

Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.

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

Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.