Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.

— Charles Baudelaire

As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.

— Charles Baudelaire

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

— Charles Baudelaire

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

— Charles Baudelaire

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morn inground a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound? I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

— Charles Baudelaire

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

— Charles Baudelaire

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

— Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.

— Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

— Charles Baudelaire

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

— Charles Baudelaire