Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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

Inspiration comes of working every day.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

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.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

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

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

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

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.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.

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

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

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

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

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.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.