Charles Baudelaire

"In relationships, the deepest connection comes not from similarity but from understanding difference."

"Solitude is where the soul learns to speak to itself and finally listens."

"I love the beautiful season when the sky rains fire and the air is transformed into dust."

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."

"I adore the beautiful disorder of the mind, the chaos that creates genius."

"Perfection is not just about control. It is also about letting go."

"The greatest pleasure is to accomplish what people think you cannot do."

"Sensuality is the awakening of the senses to their deepest possibilities."

"We love what we do not possess, and despise what lies too easily within our grasp."

"The beautiful is always strange, never convenient or useful."

"Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only one who takes life seriously."

"To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing."

"I like the beautiful season of autumn; it suits my temperament."

"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey."

"The unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil."

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocracy of sentiment it betrays."

"To be possessed by passion is to be truly alive."

"The most beautiful form of intellect is solitude."

"Genius is no more than childhood recovered at will."

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters."

"The true civilization is not in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It is in the diminution of traces of Original Sin."

"I love a strong, masculine vigor in women, but not when it hardens the face."

"The world only exists in your eyes. Without you, it would simply not exist."

"I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old."

"The greatest poetic power consists in knowing when to refrain from speech."

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

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one."

"A woman is the confusion of all things, but of all beautiful confusion."

"There exists in every human heart a spark of heavenly fire called conscience."

"To be just is to be kind with precision."