573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

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

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.