Charles Baudelaire

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

— Charles Baudelaire

Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuve

— Charles Baudelaire

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!

— Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution.

— Charles Baudelaire

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

— Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

— Charles Baudelaire

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,

— Charles Baudelaire

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

— Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.

— Charles Baudelaire

I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine.

— Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

— Charles Baudelaire

In times of old when Nature in her glad excess Like a voluptuous cat about the feet of a queen.

— Charles Baudelaire

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,

— Charles Baudelaire

Minutes, foolish mortal, are the base mineral

— Charles Baudelaire

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, —

— Charles Baudelaire

Inspiration comes of working every day.

— Charles Baudelaire

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

— Charles Baudelaire

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

— Charles Baudelaire

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,

— Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

— Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

— Charles Baudelaire