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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Always be a poet, even in prose.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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 Quote

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Inspiration comes of working every day.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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

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.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Nothing can be done except little by little.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Progress, this great heresy of decay.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

There exist only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

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 Quote

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

We are all born marked for evil.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
- Charles Baudelaire Quote

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
- Charles Baudelaire Quote