"Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered stomach."

"But if you want to be a painter you must go to France — France is the only school of Art."

"Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his."

"My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes."

"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it... you and you alone make me feel that I am alive... Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."

"A great artist is always before his time or behind it."

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

"The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind."

"Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door."

"He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted."

"I have always noticed that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go away to the country and leave no address."

"The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece."

"Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all."

"The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand."

"But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God. And yet even he lived in too aestheticized a world; and the forms for which he is praised are really quite trite: the inventions of the unknown demand new forms."

"Ne pouvant supprimer l'amour, l'Église a voulu au moins le désinfecter, et elle a fait le mariage."

"J'ai toujours été étonné qu'on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?"

"La femme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps."

"La jeune fille, ce qu'elle est en réalité.'Une petite sotte et une petite salope; la plus grande imbécile unie à la plus grande dépravation."

"Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)."

"C'est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s'accorde.'Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s'accorder."

"On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant."

"Faire son devoir tous les jours et se fier à Dieu, pour le lendemain."

"The more a man cultivates the arts, the less he gets hard. There is an ever more sensible divorce between the spirit and the brute. Only the brute gets a good hard-on, and fucking is the lyricism of the masses. To fuck is to aspire to enter another, and the artist never pulls out of himself."

"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one.… It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls the need to love."

"The unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."

"Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n'ait même pas besoin d'exister.'Ce qui est créé par l’esprit est plus vivant que la matière."

"L’amour ressemblait fort à une torture ou à une opération chirurgicale."

"Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pédéraste."

"Ces beaux et grands navires, imperceptiblement balancés (dandinés) sur les eaux tranquilles, ces robustes navires, à l'air désœuvré et nostalgique, ne nous disent-ils pas dans une langue muette : Quand partons-nous pour le bonheur?"

"Je ne conçois guère (mon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcelé?) un type de Beauté où il n'y ait du Malheur. Appuyé sur — d'autres diraient: obsédé par — ces idées, on conçoit qu'il me serait difficile de en pas conclure que le plus parfait type de Beauté virile est Satan, — à la manière de Milton."

"Ce qu'il y a d'enivrant dans le mauvais goût, c'est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire."

"Le mot littérature de décadence implique qu'il y a une échelle de littératures, une vagissante, une puérile, une adolescente, etc. Ce terme, veux-je dire, suppose quelque chose de fatal et de providentiel, comme un décret inéluctable; et il est tout à fait injuste de nous reprocher d'accomplir la loi mystérieuse. Tout ce que je puis comprendre dans la parole académique, c'est qu'il est honteux d'obéir à cette loi avec plaisir, et que nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée."

"Le progrès, cette grande hérésie de la décrépitude."

"Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion."

"C'est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, par et à travers la musique, que l'âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau; et, quand un poème exquis amène les larmes au bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un excès de jouissance, elles sont bien plutôt le témoignage d'une mélancolie irritée, d'une postulation des nerfs, d'une nature exilée dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer immédiatement, sur cette terre même, d'un paradis révélé."

"Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe, quelque chose de sacré qui nous défend d'en faire un jeu de hasard. Manier savamment une langue, c'est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire."

"Tous les grands poètes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques."

"La Révolution a été faite par des voluptueux."

"Dieu serait injuste si nous n'étions pas coupables."

"Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust."

"The imagination eulogized by Baudelaire is in his own case more often than not a synonym for desire or despair. His critical exigencies are, like those of the profoundly sick man that he was, harsh and imperative and illusory in the sense of release temporarily obtained. Yet imagination is also the faculty that gives Baudelaire a royal sense of equality with other creative artists; he uses his status as a poet to boost his activities as a critic, claiming, with total justification in his case, that criticism is a creative affair, a fine rather than applied art."

"Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty."

"Anna Margolin was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud..."

"Baudelaire's words about the albatross aptly apply to the nineteenth century: "He is affixed to the earth by his tent of giant wings."""

"He had brought a volume of Baudelaire which we read a few pages of when we had the time."

"Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art (art for the sake of art): sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose."

"Poe with a cross, that's what you are, adored of the gangster age."

"The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself."