Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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Charles Baudelaire

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 9, 1821

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

Charles Baudelaire

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Charles Baudelaire