573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

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

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.