“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food
“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.”
ReligionAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
Work“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.”
Family“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
Nature“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
Art“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
Art“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“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.”
Beauty“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
Art“Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”
Religion“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.”
Men“Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”
Poetry“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
Beauty“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty“It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”
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“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