Skip to content

Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.

— Charles Baudelaire Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art.

Original text (French)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

XI: "Éloge du maquillage"

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine.

Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfuly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

L'art romantique (1869)

This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

Le Spleen de Paris (1862)

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.

All Charles Baudelaire quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Charles Baudelaire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.