573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.

Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.