573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

"My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it."

"L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu."

"Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead."

"Do you know that high fever which invades us in our cold suffering, that aching for a land we do not know, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country which resembles you, where everything is beautiful, sumptuous, authentic, still, where fantasy has built and adorned a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wed to silence. That is where to live, that is where to die!"- Invitation to a Voyage"

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

"And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"

"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")"

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

"The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers."

"How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is."