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
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things. – Charles Baudelaire
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present. – Charles Baudelaire
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. – Charles Baudelaire
There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast. – Charles Baudelaire
Even if it were proven that God didn’t exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine. – Charles Baudelaire
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. – Charles Baudelaire
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. – Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep. – Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. – Charles Baudelaire
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. – Charles Baudelaire
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
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. – Charles Baudelaire
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes. – Charles Baudelaire
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire
Our religion is itself profoundly sad – a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language – so long as he knows anguish and is a painter. – Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. – Charles Baudelaire
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering. – Charles Baudelaire
