The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
— Charles Baudelaire
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
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.
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.
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
We are all born marked for evil.
What is art? Prostitution.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
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.
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
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.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
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.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Everything for me becomes allegory.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
