Charles Baudelaire

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

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

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

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

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.

Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.