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

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.
Charles Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Charles Baudelaire

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
Charles Baudelaire

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire

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

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire

We are all born marked for evil.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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