573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

We are all born marked for evil.

Delacroix , Wagner , Baudelaire all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject man's nervous and psychic being.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

Quand me" me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e" tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me" me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.