76 quotes
To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast.
Journaux intimes (1864)
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
Journaux intimes (1864)
One can only forget about time by making use of it.
Journaux intimes (1864)
You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
This is what a girl really is.A little fool, a little slut; the greatest idiocy united with the greatest depravity.
Journaux intimes (1864)
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)
Perhaps it would be sweet to be, in turn, both victim and executioner.
Journaux intimes (1864)
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Journaux intimes (1864)
All great poets become naturally, fatally, critics.
L'art romantique (1869)
Genius is nothing but youth recaptured at will.
A woman is natural: that is to say, abominable.
Journaux intimes (1864)
Progress, that great heresy of degenerates.
L'art romantique (1869)
I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What talk can they have with God?
Journaux intimes (1864)
Always be a poet, even in prose.
It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other.If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.
Journaux intimes (1864)
All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.
To do one's duty every day and trust in God for tomorrow.
Journaux intimes (1864)
She dazzles like the Dawn
And consoles like the Night.
Although we have a heart for the work,
Art is long and time is short.
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)