1821-1867, French Poet
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Charles Baudelaire – [Beauty]
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.
Charles Baudelaire – [Virtue]
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.
Charles Baudelaire – [Contemplation]
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
Charles Baudelaire – [Infinity]
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
Charles Baudelaire – [Critics and Criticism]
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.
Charles Baudelaire – [Romance and Romanticism]
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
Charles Baudelaire – [Sin]
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
Charles Baudelaire – [Republican]
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
Charles Baudelaire – [Time and Time Management]
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
Charles Baudelaire – [Taste]
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.
Charles Baudelaire – [Poetry and Poets]
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