Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
— Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
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.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
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.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
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.
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
Inspiration comes of working every day.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Music fathoms the sky.
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.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
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.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
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.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
