A biography for Charles Baudelairehasn’t been written yet.
“Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.”
“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.”
“There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.”
“And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”
“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”
“A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”
“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
“Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.”
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi”
“To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.”
“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
“There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.”
“Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.”
“My love, do you recall the object which we saw,That fair, sweet, summer morn!At a turn in the path a foul carcassOn a gravel strewn bed,Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,Burning and dripping with poisons,Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant wayIts belly, swollen with gases.”
“The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
“Progress, this great heresy of decay.”
“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”
“There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.”
“It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”
“Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.”