Top 100 Charles Baudelaire Quotes
#7. The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
#8. The cannon thunders ... limbs fly in all directions ... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice ... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
Charles Baudelaire
#9. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#10. To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
#11. Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
Charles Baudelaire
#14. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire
#15. What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.
Charles Baudelaire
#16. Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Charles Baudelaire
#17. Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing.
Charles Baudelaire
#20. Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.
Charles Baudelaire
#21. There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
Charles Baudelaire
#22. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire
#23. Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.
Charles Baudelaire
#24. Lost in this awful world, rubbing shoulders with the multitudes, I am like a tired man whose eye can't see behind him, in the deep years, anything but disillusion and bitterness, and in front of him, nothing but a storm which contains nothing new, neither learning nor pain.
Charles Baudelaire
#26. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#28. The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.
Charles Baudelaire
#29. To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
Charles Baudelaire
#30. He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.
Charles Baudelaire
#31. In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.
Charles Baudelaire
#32. Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du NOUVEAU! (rough translation : Into the abyss
Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make? / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!)
Charles Baudelaire
#33. There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.
Charles Baudelaire
#35. However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.
Charles Baudelaire
#36. To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
#37. How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,
To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
Charles Baudelaire
#38. Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.
Charles Baudelaire
#39. For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
#40. For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.
Charles Baudelaire
#42. Quand me" me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e" tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me" me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.
Charles Baudelaire
#43. This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.
Charles Baudelaire
#45. Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
Charles Baudelaire
#46. Regarding sleep, this sinister adventure of each night, one could say that people fall asleep daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we didn't know that it results from their being oblivious of danger.
Charles Baudelaire
#47. The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles Baudelaire
#49. A tender heart unnerved by nothingness
hoards every fragment of the radiant past.
Charles Baudelaire
#52. By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
Charles Baudelaire
#53. There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
Charles Baudelaire
#55. The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.
Charles Baudelaire
#56. I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire
#57. Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Charles Baudelaire
#58. All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.
Charles Baudelaire
#59. Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire
#60. The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.
Charles Baudelaire
#61. I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.
Charles Baudelaire
#62. But how you'd please me, night! without those stars
Whose light speaks in a language I have known!
Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare!
Charles Baudelaire
#63. What is it that brings on these moods of yours?
Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.
Charles Baudelaire
#64. That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.
Charles Baudelaire
#65. Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles Baudelaire
#66. I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
Charles Baudelaire
#67. It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.
Charles Baudelaire
#68. Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.
Charles Baudelaire
#69. Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.
Charles Baudelaire
#70. Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies
Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!
Charles Baudelaire
#71. Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even serene in its passion. - Regions of pure Poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
#72. Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.
Charles Baudelaire
#73. He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.
Charles Baudelaire
#74. All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
Charles Baudelaire
#76. In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.
Charles Baudelaire
#77. My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.
Charles Baudelaire
#78. True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
Charles Baudelaire
#81. A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It's a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse.
Charles Baudelaire
#83. In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!
Charles Baudelaire
#84. Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
Charles Baudelaire
#85. I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
Charles Baudelaire
#86. But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: Let's go!
Charles Baudelaire
#90. Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
Charles Baudelaire
#93. The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire
#95. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#96. The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Charles Baudelaire
#97. Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
Charles Baudelaire
#98. I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
Charles Baudelaire
#100. A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.
Charles Baudelaire
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
