Charles Baudelaire

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

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

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

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.

I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.

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!

...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

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

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.