Charles Baudelaire

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

“Music fathoms the sky.”

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

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

“The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.”

“All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”

“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”

“To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.”

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”

“Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.”

“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.”

“It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”

“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”

“The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.”

“Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.”

“The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.”

“I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.”

“That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.”

“Everything for me becomes allegory.”