Charles Baudelaire

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

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.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

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.

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.

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.

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

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

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

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.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.