Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also worked as an essayist, art critic and translator. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.

Charles Baudelaire Quotes

1. “With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.”
— Charles Baudelaire

2. “Nothing can be done except little by little.”
— Charles Baudelaire

3. “Always be a poet, even in prose.”
— Charles Baudelaire

4. “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”
— Charles Baudelaire

5. “Inspiration comes of working every day.”
— Charles Baudelaire

6. “The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
— Charles Baudelaire

7. “Through the Unknown, we’ll find the New.”
— Charles Baudelaire

8. “What is love? The need of coming out of one’s self.”
— Charles Baudelaire

9. “My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.”
— Charles Baudelaire

10. “La’, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute, Luxe, calme et volupte. There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.”
— Charles Baudelaire

11. “Music fathoms the sky.”
— Charles Baudelaire

12. “I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.”
— Charles Baudelaire

13. “A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.”
— Charles Baudelaire

14. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

15. “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
— Charles Baudelaire

16. “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
— Charles Baudelaire

17. “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
— Charles Baudelaire

18. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”
— Charles Baudelaire

19. “My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

20. “The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.”
— Charles Baudelaire

21. “Evil comes up softly like a flower.”
— Charles Baudelaire

22. “A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.”
— Charles Baudelaire

23. “The beautiful is always bizarre.”
— Charles Baudelaire

24. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.”
— Charles Baudelaire

25. “One can only forget about time by making use of it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

26. “I am the vampire at my own veins.”
— Charles Baudelaire

27. “There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.”
— Charles Baudelaire

28. “Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalite ; le bien est toujours le produit d’un art. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it’s destiny; good is always a product of art.”
— Charles Baudelaire

29. “The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.”
— Charles Baudelaire

30. “Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.”
— Charles Baudelaire

31. “It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.”
— Charles Baudelaire

32. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”
— Charles Baudelaire

33. “Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

35. “This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.”
— Charles Baudelaire

36. “Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult’s capacities.”
— Charles Baudelaire

37. “Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.”
— Charles Baudelaire

38. “All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.”
— Charles Baudelaire

39. “A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
— Charles Baudelaire

40. “A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”
— Charles Baudelaire

41. “What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!”
— Charles Baudelaire

42. “There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.”
— Charles Baudelaire

43. “Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.”
— Charles Baudelaire

44. “A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.”
— Charles Baudelaire

45. “Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.”
— Charles Baudelaire

46. “We are all born marked for evil.”
— Charles Baudelaire

47. “Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.”
— Charles Baudelaire

48. “It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.”
— Charles Baudelaire

49. “Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.”
— Charles Baudelaire

50. “From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.”
— Charles Baudelaire

51. “How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
— Charles Baudelaire

52. “A child sees everything in a sense of newness – he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.”
— Charles Baudelaire

53. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

54. “The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.”
— Charles Baudelaire

55. “A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

57. “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
— Charles Baudelaire

58. “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans. IhavemorememoriesthanifIwereonethousandyearsold.”
— Charles Baudelaire

59. “Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.”
— Charles Baudelaire

60. “I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
— Charles Baudelaire

61. “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.”
— Charles Baudelaire

62. “Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.”
— Charles Baudelaire

63. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

64. “Etre un homme utile m’a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux. To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.”
— Charles Baudelaire

65. “What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.”
— Charles Baudelaire

66. “From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make – fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen – The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?”
— Charles Baudelaire

67. “He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.”
— Charles Baudelaire

68. “The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.”
— Charles Baudelaire

69. “Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
— Charles Baudelaire

70. “What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”
— Charles Baudelaire

71. “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

73. “There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”
— Charles Baudelaire

74. “What is it that brings on these moods of yours? Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.”
— Charles Baudelaire

75. “How bittersweet it is, on winter’s night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.”
— Charles Baudelaire

76. “The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.”
— Charles Baudelaire

77. “Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.”
— Charles Baudelaire

78. “Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.”
— Charles Baudelaire

79. “I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.”
— Charles Baudelaire

80. “Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
— Charles Baudelaire

81. “Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.”
— Charles Baudelaire

82. “Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
— Charles Baudelaire

83. “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.”
— Charles Baudelaire

84. “Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”
— Charles Baudelaire

85. “Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.”
— Charles Baudelaire

86. “The world only goes round by misunderstanding.”
— Charles Baudelaire

87. “There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

89. “Le beau est toujours bizarre.”
— Charles Baudelaire

90. “As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”
— Charles Baudelaire

91. “Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes give voice to confused words;.”
— Charles Baudelaire

92. “How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.”
— Charles Baudelaire

93. “Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!”
— Charles Baudelaire

94. “This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.”
— Charles Baudelaire

95. “What is art? Prostitution.”
— Charles Baudelaire

96. “Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”
— Charles Baudelaire

97. “Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.”
— Charles Baudelaire

98. “Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.”
— Charles Baudelaire

99. “To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.”
— Charles Baudelaire

100. “Alas! Man’s vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.”
— Charles Baudelaire

101. “I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.”
— Charles Baudelaire

102. “Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.”
— Charles Baudelaire

103. “I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
— Charles Baudelaire

104. “The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”
— Charles Baudelaire

105. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

106. “I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”
— Charles Baudelaire

107. “Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”
— Charles Baudelaire

108. “Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music.”
— Charles Baudelaire

109. “Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.”
— Charles Baudelaire

110. “In order not to feel time’s horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!”
— Charles Baudelaire

111. “One man illumines you with his other sets in you his sorrow.”
— Charles Baudelaire

112. “L’art est long, et le temps est court.”
— Charles Baudelaire

113. “In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
— Charles Baudelaire

114. “There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.”
— Charles Baudelaire

115. “The mainspring of genius is curiosity.”
— Charles Baudelaire

116. “But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.”
— Charles Baudelaire

117. “In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.”
— Charles Baudelaire

118. “Our mortal eyes, however bright, are only darkened melancholy mirrors.”
— Charles Baudelaire

119. “I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.”
— Charles Baudelaire

120. “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.”
— Charles Baudelaire

121. “Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.”
— Charles Baudelaire

122. “I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
— Charles Baudelaire

123. “What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.”
— Charles Baudelaire

124. “Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
— Charles Baudelaire

125. “My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!”
— Charles Baudelaire

126. “The poet is like the prince of clouds Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer; Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.”
— Charles Baudelaire

127. “Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even – all must combine to realize a character.”
— Charles Baudelaire

128. “There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.”
— Charles Baudelaire

129. “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

130. “It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.”
— Charles Baudelaire

131. “Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer’s stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.”
— Charles Baudelaire

132. “True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.”
— Charles Baudelaire

133. “To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.”
— Charles Baudelaire

134. “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”
— Charles Baudelaire

135. “A silent mouth is sweet to hear.”
— Charles Baudelaire

136. “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”
— Charles Baudelaire

137. “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”
— Charles Baudelaire

138. “I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”
— Charles Baudelaire

139. “Amer savoir, celui qu’on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.”
— Charles Baudelaire

140. “It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.”
— Charles Baudelaire

141. “Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.”
— Charles Baudelaire

142. “Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?”
— Charles Baudelaire

143. “Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.”
— Charles Baudelaire

144. “Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.”
— Charles Baudelaire

145. “It’s the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance.”
— Charles Baudelaire

146. “Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

147. “We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.”
— Charles Baudelaire

148. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

149. “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.”
— Charles Baudelaire

150. “We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.”
— Charles Baudelaire

151. “Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.”
— Charles Baudelaire

152. “Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t’embrasser neuf fois.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

154. “If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

155. “It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.”
— Charles Baudelaire

156. “Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.”
— Charles Baudelaire

157. “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

158. “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

159. “To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
— Charles Baudelaire

160. “Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.”
— Charles Baudelaire

161. “Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.”
— Charles Baudelaire

162. “The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”
— Charles Baudelaire

163. “Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is the Dandy?”
— Charles Baudelaire

164. “What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
— Charles Baudelaire

165. “To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
— Charles Baudelaire

166. “Within the bottle’s depths, the wine’s soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.”
— Charles Baudelaire

167. “A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias – because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love – we must be stingy with it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

168. “I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.”
— Charles Baudelaire

169. “You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.”
— Charles Baudelaire

170. “Avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?”
— Charles Baudelaire

171. “Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom.”
— Charles Baudelaire

172. “In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.”
— Charles Baudelaire

173. “Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.”
— Charles Baudelaire

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

175. “I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.”
— Charles Baudelaire

176. “On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.”
— Charles Baudelaire

177. “He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight – Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things!”
— Charles Baudelaire

178. “Dis-moi, ton coeur parfois s’envole-t-il, Agathe!”
— Charles Baudelaire

179. “Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
— Charles Baudelaire

180. “If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.”
— Charles Baudelaire

181. “It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.”
— Charles Baudelaire

182. “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 a essential part and characteristic of beauty.”
— Charles Baudelaire

183. “Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.”
— Charles Baudelaire

184. “It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”
— Charles Baudelaire

185. “If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.”
— Charles Baudelaire

186. “Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.”
— Charles Baudelaire

187. “Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.”
— Charles Baudelaire

188. “L’imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.”
— Charles Baudelaire

189. “You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue – take your pick. But be drunk.”
— Charles Baudelaire

190. “Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.”
— Charles Baudelaire

191. “Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.”
— Charles Baudelaire

192. “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

193. “Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.”
— Charles Baudelaire

194. “The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.”
— Charles Baudelaire

195. “A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It’s a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse.”
— Charles Baudelaire

196. “Progress, this great heresy of decay.”
— Charles Baudelaire

197. “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”
— Charles Baudelaire

198. “Comme l’imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.”
— Charles Baudelaire

199. “Everything for me becomes allegory.”
— Charles Baudelaire

200. “What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.”
— Charles Baudelaire