A biography for Charles Baudelairehasn’t been written yet.
“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
“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.”
“For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.”
“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
“It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
“The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.”
“Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
“Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.”
“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
“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.”
“In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
“In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.”
“Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.”
“How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
“I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.”