The beautiful is always bizarre.

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.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

Inspiration comes of working every day.

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.

On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning 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 laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,That fair, sweet, summer morn!At a turn in the path a foul carcassOn a gravel strewn bed,Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,Burning and dripping with poisons,Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant wayIts belly, swollen with gases.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,Where evil comes up softly like a flower.Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;But like an old sad faithful lecher, fainTo drink delight of that enormous trullWhose hellish beauty makes me young again.Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,Sodden with day, or, new appareled, standIn gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,I love thee, infamous city! Harlots andHunted have pleasures of their own to give,The vulgar herd can never understand.

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

Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

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!

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

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

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.

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

The Beautiful is always strange.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Nature can counsel nothing but crime.

Music fathoms the sky.

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

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.

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

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

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.

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.

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

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

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.

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

I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.

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

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

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 vomitive.

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

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.Du bouffon favori la grotesque balladeNe distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilettePour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais puDe son être extirper l'élément corrompu,Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéOù coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,one who escapes his tutor's monologues,and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,our tyrants' solace in senility,he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

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

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

Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.

In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.

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

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

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.

The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that he can sleep.

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work except one that you dare not start.

Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work that disagreeable thing is the only way of not suffering in life or at all events of suffering less.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).