Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ 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

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

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ 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

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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.

~ Charles Baudelaire