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

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

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Charles Baudelaire

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

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

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
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

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
Charles Baudelaire

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
Charles Baudelaire

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Charles Baudelaire

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything for me becomes allegory.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire