Charles Baudelaire

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

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

“L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.”

“Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.”

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”

“Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.”

“On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.”

“Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!”

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

“Nature can counsel nothing but crime.”

“Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!”

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

“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.”

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

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

“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.”

“How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.”

“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.”

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”

“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”