Charles Baudelaire Quotes

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man`s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

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.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

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.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

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 ou