Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

— Charles Baudelaire

Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.

— Charles Baudelaire

To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.

— Charles Baudelaire

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.

— Charles Baudelaire

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

— Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

— Charles Baudelaire

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

— Charles Baudelaire

We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

— Charles Baudelaire

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

— Charles Baudelaire

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

— Charles Baudelaire