“It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
Poetry
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
PoetryAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”
Art“France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.”
Poetry“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty“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.”
Religion“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry“Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”
Religion“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
Nature“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
Respect“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.”
Art“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
Art“This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.”
Change“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.”
Beauty“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”
Nature“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
Beauty“What is art? Prostitution.”
Art“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”
Art