Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Author
Charles Baudelaire
53 quotations
About Charles Baudelaire
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Charles BaudelaireThe 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 imposs…
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.
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all…
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.
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…
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
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Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
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.
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.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Music fathoms the sky.
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.
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.
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.