76 quotes
Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie.
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
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.
Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
It is the hour when the swarm of malevolent dreams
Makes sun-browned adolescents writhe upon their pillows.
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.
Journaux intimes (1864)
There, all is order and beauty only,
Splendor, peace, and pleasure.
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams,
Words!
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.
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
Hypocrite reader — my likeness — my brother!
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Journaux intimes (1864)
The unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.
Journaux intimes (1864)
What matters an eternity of damnation to someone who has found in one second the infinity of joy?
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.
Les paradis artificiels (1860)
A medal, newly-coined, of flashing silver,
The full moon shone. The night was old.
Its solemn grandeur, like a mighty river,
Through sleeping Paris softly rolled.
Nature is a temple where living columns
Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
Each man carries within himself his own dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we count filled with pleasure, with prosperous and effective action?
Les paradis artificiels (1860)
An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
L'art romantique (1869)
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
The Revolution had been made by voluptuaries.
L'art romantique (1869)
Naked was my dark love, and, knowing my heart,
Adorned in but her most sonorous gems,
Their high pomp decked her with the conquering art
Of Moorish slave girls crowned with diadems.