France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Charles Baudelaire

Categorized in : Facts Use France

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

Charles Baudelaire

strangeness ingredients

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Charles Baudelaire

matter doe heaven

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

Charles Baudelaire

strong dream running

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

Charles Baudelaire

drunk wine wish

Nothing can be done except little by little.

Charles Baudelaire

perseverance done literature

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Charles Baudelaire

devil doe 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.

Charles Baudelaire

color mean art

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

Charles Baudelaire

god order needs

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

Charles Baudelaire

damnation delight matter

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

Charles Baudelaire

multitudes delight happiness

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

Charles Baudelaire

butterfly together bird

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

Charles Baudelaire

crime should art

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Charles Baudelaire

doe justice beauty

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

Charles Baudelaire

drunk wine drinking

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

Charles Baudelaire

mysterious merit dancing

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Charles Baudelaire

childhood genius inspire

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

Charles Baudelaire

what-if games winning

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

Charles Baudelaire

conquer desire inspire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire

literature men

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Charles Baudelaire

strange-phenomena innocent monsters