Top 100 Baudelaire's Quotes
#1. Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that.
Kris Saknussemm
#2. I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.
Rachel Kushner
#3. In a way Poe was a big influence for Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. I think he really did influence many artist of the time like Baudelaire, who was a big fan of Poe, and who was the one that brought attention to Poe's work in Europe.
Raul Garcia
#4. Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.
Roberto Calasso
#5. You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
Charles Baudelaire
#7. And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world.
Charles Baudelaire
#9. Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Charles Baudelaire
#10. There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire
#11. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
Charles Baudelaire
#12. The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'.
Gemma Burgess
#13. Life isn't fair, he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.
Lemony Snicket
#14. Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.
Charles Baudelaire
#15. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.
Charles Baudelaire
#16. 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
#18. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#19. The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.
Malcolm McLaren
#20. To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
#21. And the lamp having at last resigned itself to death.
There was nothing now but firelight in the room,
And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath
It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.
Charles Baudelaire
#22. And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.
Patti Smith
#23. Time after time he[Count Olaf] had come very close to succeeding, and time after time the Baudelaire orphans had revealed his plan, and time after time he had escaped-and all Mr. Poe had ever done was cough.
Lemony Snicket
#24. The Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
Charles Baudelaire
#25. 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
#26. I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God?
The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil.
Charles Baudelaire
#27. Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.
Charles Baudelaire
#29. In the days that followed, the Baudelaire orphans had pits in their stomachs. In Sunny's case it was understandable, because when Klaus had divided the peach, she had gotten the part with the pit.
Lemony Snicket
#30. It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,' Moreland had once remarked. 'It just happens there are more of the former types.
Anthony Powell
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!
Charles Baudelaire
#35. Il faut travailler sinon par go u t, au moins par de sespoir, puisque, tout bien ve rifie , travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser. We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement.
Charles Baudelaire
#36. Poe's drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes.
Charles Baudelaire
#37. 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
Charles Baudelaire
#39. Johnny Depp is like a brother to me. We have matching tattoos on our backs - Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing. It's kind of a secret. People say to us, 'Why did you get that?' And we say, 'No reason.'
Marilyn Manson
#40. Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Charles Baudelaire
#41. For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being.
Gaston Bachelard
#42. Very lovely indeed
- Quigley responding to Violet's comment about the view, while actually looking at her.
Lemony Snicket
#43. This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.
Charles Baudelaire
#44. If one's safety is threatened, one often finds courage one didn't know one had, and the eldest Baudelaire found she could be brave enough to open the door.
Lemony Snicket
#46. 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
#47. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#48. Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.
Charles Baudelaire
#49. Violet stayed still as a statue. She hadn't been listening to the last speech of Count Olaf's, knowing it would be full of the usual self-congratulatory nonsense and despicable insults.
Lemony Snicket
#50. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#51. Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.
Charles Baudelaire
#53. The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Charles Baudelaire
#56. At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.
Iggy Pop
#57. Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#58. For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
Charles Baudelaire
#60. There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#61. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#62. Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
#63. Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
Charles Baudelaire
#66. Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
Charles Baudelaire
#68. In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.
Charles Baudelaire
#69. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#70. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
#71. The next name on the list is Ed Valiantbrue, which doesn't have an O in it anyway."
"O!" Sunny shrieked.
"O!" Klaus agreed.
"O!" Sunny insisted.
"Oh!" Klaus cried. "I see what you mean! If it doesn't have am O in it, it can't be an anagram of Violet Baudelaire.
Lemony Snicket
#72. A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Charles Baudelaire
#73. This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
Charles Baudelaire
#74. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
Charles Baudelaire
#76. Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
Charles Baudelaire
#78. If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire
#79. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
Charles Baudelaire
#80. I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Charles Baudelaire
#81. 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
#82. The manager frowned, as if the middle Baudelaire had given him the wrong answer.
That's the rooftop bathing salon," he said. "People who sunbathe aren't usually interested in library science, so they're not picky about the salon's location. Now get moving!
Lemony Snicket
#83. Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!
Charles Baudelaire
#84. Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
Charles Baudelaire
#85. A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk.
Charles Baudelaire
#86. A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
#87. Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?
Charles Baudelaire
#89. Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
Charles Baudelaire
#90. Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
Charles Baudelaire
#91. The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Charles Baudelaire
#92. The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
#94. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#95. 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.
Charles Baudelaire
#96. It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.
Charles Baudelaire
#97. Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#98. Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
#99. Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire
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