It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky.
Charles Baudelaire

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

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Charles Baudelaire

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Charles Baudelaire

Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Charles Baudelaire

Progress, this great heresy of decay.
Charles Baudelaire

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
Charles Baudelaire

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

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
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 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

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

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Charles Baudelaire

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
Charles Baudelaire