For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Charles Baudelaire

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Charles Baudelaire

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Charles Baudelaire

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
Charles Baudelaire

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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.
Charles Baudelaire

Inspiration comes of working every day.
Charles Baudelaire

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

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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