Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.

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

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.