573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

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.

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.

Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.