But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Charles Baudelaire

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky.

Charles Baudelaire

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Charles Baudelaire

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire

Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Charles Baudelaire