Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"A breath of wind from the wings of madness."

"A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else."

"A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry."

"Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

"For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."

"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree."

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

"Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest."

"Nothing can be done except little by little."

"Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter."

"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."

"The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find."

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

"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."

"The world only goes round by misunderstanding."

"There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."

"There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite."

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

"We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose."

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