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
Nothing can be done except little by little. – Charles Baudelaire
Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul. – Charles Baudelaire
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. – Charles Baudelaire
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form. – Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. – Charles Baudelaire
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. – Charles Baudelaire
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
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense. – Charles Baudelaire
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite. – Charles Baudelaire
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning,…then they fall down the curtains. – Charles Baudelaire
The world only goes round by misunderstanding. – Charles Baudelaire
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
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it. – Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep. – Charles Baudelaire
As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work. – Charles Baudelaire
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card. – Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. – Charles Baudelaire
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with mans 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
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
