Charles Baudelaire Quotes

One must astound the bourgeois.

At its best a poem full of space and reverie.

I cannot imagine how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without disgust.

The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since he is supreme friend to every individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.

There are only three respectable beings: priest, warrior, poet. To know, to kill and to create.

Every man at every moment has two simultaneous tendencies: one toward God, the other toward Satan.

We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement.

To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.

The dandy must aspire to be sublime at all times.He must live and sleep in front of a mirror.

Woman is natural, that is, abominable.

The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.

Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.God is the only being who, in order to reign, need not even exist.

Modern art tends towards the demonic.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it’s destiny; good is always a product of art.

Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

Just because the beautiful is always shocking, it would be absurd to suppose that that which is shocking is always beautiful.

This is the time for drunkenness! Be not the martyred slaves of Time, drink without stopping! Drink wine, poetry, or virtue, as you please.

Woe betide the man who goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method!