Charles Baudelaire

"Deep in the unknown we hide our shining star."

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated into insolence."

"The beautiful is always bizarre; without this deviation from the natural norm, there is no beauty."

"Action is the only reality; not only is it the supremacy of reality, but it is the only conceivable reality."

"The most lamentable thing about the conduct of mankind is that it destroys beauty."

"I create myself anew every day."

"The lover of life makes the whole world into his household."

"In every creature there lives a spark of the Divine Light."

"To know beauty is to possess a secret knowledge."

"Music expresses that which cannot be said in words and that which cannot remain silent."

"The greatest achievement is to cultivate the garden of your own soul."

"Hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste, but they detest at leisure."

"Paradoxes are the only truths."

"The butterfly is evidence of reincarnation."

"True love must include the element of passionate desire and the willingness to sacrifice."

"In my youth I was a firebrand, but now I am a philosopher of ash and embers."

"The most beautiful thing about fire is that it consumes itself to give light."

"All the vices of mankind come from forgetting who they are and what they are."

"The true knowledge consists not in knowing many things, but in knowing what is worth knowing."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror."

"Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."

"The most magnanimous action is that by which we overcome ourselves."

"Every intelligent man is lazy."

"The beautiful souls are those who do not rebel against their nature but perfect it."

"In order to understand the world, one must sometimes turn away from it and contemplate it from afar."

"Poetry is a mysterious chemistry of the soul."

"The source of all great art is in the human heart."

"I am fond of beauty; I hate vulgarity."

"The only way to deal with tyranny is to refuse to participate in it."

"To love is to wish to give oneself, to offer oneself completely."