Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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It is not possible to dissociate poetry from human feeling. What else is art if not the revelation of man and his situation in the universe of things, of feelings, of society?

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Poetry cannot, without threatening it with death or decay, assimilate itself to science or morality... The ways of demonstrating truths are different and elsewhere.

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Poetry has no purpose outside Itself... I do not mean to say that poetry does not ennoble morals - let me be clear -, that its final result is not the elevation of man above vulgar interests, that would be absurd... I say that if the poet pursued a moral purpose, he diminished his poetic force...

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In the poetic and artistic order, a revealer rarely has a precursor. Any flowering is spontaneous, individual... The artist only manifests himself.

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Poetry: ... the expression, the soul, and the repertoire of knowledge of a nation, when it is in its infancy.

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The categorical absence of justice and truth in art is the same as the absence of art.

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Any literature that refuses to step fraternally between science and philosophy is murderous and suicidal literature.

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Art is not only the revelation of life, but also its solution... without art, that is, without the intervention of fantasy, both life and its experience would be incomplete, vain, formless.

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The peremptory character of testimony gives art its own truth.

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There is something sacred in the word, in the Verb, which forbids us to make it a game of chance. To master a language is to practice a kind of sorcery.