Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. – Charles Baudelaire
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. – Charles Baudelaire
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. – Charles Baudelaire
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. – Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. – Charles Baudelaire
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. – Charles Baudelaire
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. – Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. – 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
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
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed. – Charles Baudelaire
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. – Charles Baudelaire
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated. – Charles Baudelaire
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. – Charles Baudelaire
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. – Charles Baudelaire
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. – Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art. – Charles Baudelaire