Charles Baudelaire Quotes

For I desire the dark, the naked, and the lone.

Acel ce-şi strânge lacom iubita-n braţe pare
Un muribund ce-n taină mormântul şi-l dezmiardă.

Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts,
Which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart

Scent, sound or sight, beneficent, malign – Who cares if you’re a blessing or a curse, So long as you bring light,

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.

I am but little disposed to put things in writing. One almost always regrets doing so.

Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low.

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,
Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,
One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memories
In whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.

- The Flask

Go then, a starveling girl
With no perfume or pearls,
Only your nudity
O my beauty!

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t'embrasser neuf fois.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).