Charles Baudelaire Quotes

"There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed."

"True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin."

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."

"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."

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense."

"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."