Top 100 Quotes About Baudelaire
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.
Peter Schjeldahl
#16. The fire was set in the Library of Records by the Baudelaire murderers, and has spread to the Sore Throat Ward, the Stubbed Toe Ward, and the Accidentally Swallowed Something You Shouldn't Have Ward.
Lemony Snicket
#17. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher ... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.
Henry James
#18. I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.
Rachel Kushner
#19. Do you know why I have so patiently translated Poe? Because he resembled me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw with terror and rapture subjects dreamed by me and described by him, twenty years earlier. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Otto Rahn
#20. Of all the people in the world who have miserable lives - and, as I'm sure you know, there are quite a few - the Baudelaire youngsters take the cake, a phrase which here means that more horrible things have happened them than just about anybody.
Lemony Snicket
#21. It made the Baudelaire sisters a little sad to see all those books sitting in the library unread and unnoticed, like stray dogs or lost children that nobody wanted to take home.
Lemony Snicket
#22. Get out of my way, you cakesniffers! said a rude, violent, and filthy little girl, shoving the Baudelaire orphans aside as she dashed by.
Lemony Snicket
#23. ... and the Baudelaire orphans climbed aboard, turning the tables of their lives and breaking their unfortunate cycle for the very first time.
Lemony Snicket
#24. Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
#25. 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
#26. Charles Baudelaire would have the curious believe that the finest trick the Devil ever performed was in persuading the world that he did not exist. Baudelaire was mistaken. There was no persuasion.
John Zande
#27. 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
#28. Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.
Lemony Snicket
#29. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God.
Arthur Rimbaud
#30. I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.
Brenda Hillman
#31. Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.
Lemony Snicket
#32. 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
#33. In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.
Rachel Kushner
#34. The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.
Julio Cortazar
#35. That a story in The Daily Punctilio was completely true, and to show this article to so many volunteers, including the Baudelaire parents, the Snicket siblings, and the woman I happened to love.
Lemony Snicket
#36. Mr. Poe couldn't think of anything else to say that might have comforted the Baudelaire orphans, but I wish now that I had the power to go back in time and speak to these three sobbing children.
Lemony Snicket
#37. As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular.
Sophie Barthes
#38. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J.G. Ballard
#39. For a decadent like Baudelaire the only possible ends are suicide or the foot of the cross
Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly
#40. The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific 'poets'.
Alain De Botton
#41. And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
Delmore Schwartz
#42. 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
#43. As he has promised, no harm has come to the Baudelaire orphans in the Reptile Room, but great harm had come to Uncle Monty.
Lemony Snicket
#44. 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
#45. But he was not looking at the view beneath him. He was looking beside him, where Violet Baudelaire was sitting,
Lemony Snicket
#46. 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
#47. It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutile (unwash-awayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.
Mark Forsyth
#48. You don't even have a cat or a dog or anything?"
"You think I should?" George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn't have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.
"Hell, no! Didn't Baudelaire say they're liable to turn into demons and take over your life?
Christopher Isherwood
#49. What can I do?" Klaus asked.
"You can pray this works," Violet said, but the Baudelaire sisters were so quick with their tasks that there was no time for even the shortest of religious ceremonies.
Lemony Snicket
#50. The Baudelaire orphans looked worriedly out the window. They weren't very happy about just being dropped off in a strange place, as if they were a pizza being delivered instead of three children all alone in the world.
Lemony Snicket
#51. Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
Charles Baudelaire
#52. 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
#53. Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.
Charles Baudelaire
#54. This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
Charles Baudelaire
#55. A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Charles Baudelaire
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. 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
#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
#64. Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
#65. 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
#66. There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#68. For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
Charles Baudelaire
#69. Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.
Charles Baudelaire
#72. The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire
#76. Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
#77. Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
Charles Baudelaire
#78. It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.
Charles Baudelaire
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
#88. 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
#89. Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
Charles Baudelaire
#90. Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!
Charles Baudelaire
#91. 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
#92. I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Charles Baudelaire
#93. 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
#94. If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
Charles Baudelaire
#99. 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
#100. To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
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