573 Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music.

You can live three days without bread – without poetry, never; and those of you who can say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds.

You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue – take your pick. But be drunk.

Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?

Be wise, Oh my sadness, be calmer.

A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way...

He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.

Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.