Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

— Charles Baudelaire

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shorthand Art is long.

— Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

— Charles Baudelaire

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

— Charles Baudelaire

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

— Charles Baudelaire

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

— Charles Baudelaire

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness-natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a positive.

— Charles Baudelaire

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

— Charles Baudelaire

He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

— Charles Baudelaire

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

— Charles Baudelaire