573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of Number

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.