Top 100 Quotes About Baudelaire
#1. Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
Charles Baudelaire
#2. 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
#3. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#4. This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
Charles Baudelaire
#5. A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Charles Baudelaire
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#14. 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
#15. Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
#16. 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
#17. There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#19. For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
Charles Baudelaire
#20. Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#21. 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
#24. The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Charles Baudelaire
#27. Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire
#28. Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
#29. Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#30. It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.
Charles Baudelaire
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
#35. 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
#36. 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
#39. 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
#40. A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
#41. 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
#42. Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
Charles Baudelaire
#43. Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!
Charles Baudelaire
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Charles Baudelaire
#47. 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
#48. If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. The Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
Charles Baudelaire
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.
Charles Baudelaire
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire
#68. Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Charles Baudelaire
#70. 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
#72. If Baudelaire, in hieroglyphics of the soul, had deciphered the return of the age of the sentiment and ideas, Poe, in the field of morbid psychology had more especially investigated the domain of the soul.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#73. Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
Charles Baudelaire
#74. The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.
Charles Baudelaire
#77. What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
Charles Baudelaire
#78. If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.
Charles Baudelaire
#79. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
Charles Baudelaire
#80. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire
#81. All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#82. The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
Charles Baudelaire
#83. What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.
Charles Baudelaire
#84. Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Charles Baudelaire
#85. 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
#87. How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!
Charles Baudelaire
#89. The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases.
Charles Baudelaire
#90. Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.
Charles Baudelaire
#91. He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
Charles Baudelaire
#92. Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
#93. 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
#94. Wretchedness. It is atrociously unfair, of course, that the Baudelaires have so many troubles, but that is the way the story goes. So now that I've told you that the first sentence will be The Baudelaire
Lemony Snicket
#95. Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire
#96. 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
#97. There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
Charles Baudelaire
#98. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire
#99. The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.
Charles Baudelaire
#100. Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
Charles Baudelaire
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