Quotes & Sayings About Baudelaire

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

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

From his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily. — Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. — Charles Baudelaire

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

- Who dares, in front of Love, to mention Hell?
Curbed forever be that useless dreamer
Who first imagined, in his brutish mind,
Of sheer futility the fatuous schemer,
Honour with Love could ever be combined.
He who in mystic union would enmesh
Shadow with warmth, and daytime with the night,
Will never warm his paralytic flesh
At the red sun of amorous delight.
Go, if you wish, and seek some boorish lover:
Offer your virgin heart to his crude hold,
Full of remorse and horror you'll recover,
And bring me your scarred breast to be consoled ...
Down here, a soul can only serve one master.
(Damned Women) — Charles Baudelaire

Evil comes up softly like a flower. — Charles Baudelaire

My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present — Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window. — Charles Baudelaire

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois. — Charles Baudelaire

Very lovely indeed
- Quigley responding to Violet's comment about the view, while actually looking at her. — Lemony Snicket

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

You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe? — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

We revel in the laxness of the path we take. — Charles Baudelaire

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time. — Charles Baudelaire

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

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution. — Charles Baudelaire

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa. — Charles Baudelaire

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance — Charles Baudelaire

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk. — Charles Baudelaire

Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified — Charles Baudelaire

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

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion. — Charles Baudelaire

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born. — Charles Baudelaire

Bambini!" Uncle Monty cried out from the front door. "Come along, bambini!"
The Baudelaire orphans raced back through the hedges to where their new guardian was waiting for them. "Violet, Uncle Monty," Violet said. "My name is Violet, my brother's is Klaus, and Sunny is our baby sister. None of us is named Bambini."
"'Bambini' is the Italian word for 'children,'" Uncle Monty explained. "I had a sudden urge to speak a little Italian. I'm so excited to have you three here with me, you're lucky I'm not speaking gibberish. — Lemony Snicket

It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise. — Charles Baudelaire

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery. — Charles Baudelaire

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

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,
Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand. — Charles Baudelaire

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist. — Charles Baudelaire

Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams. — Charles Baudelaire

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. — Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation. — Charles Baudelaire

Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage. — Charles Baudelaire

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true. — Charles Baudelaire

The world progresses only through misunderstanding. — Charles Baudelaire

Remembering is only a new form of suffering. — Charles Baudelaire

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. — Charles Baudelaire

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me. — Lemony Snicket

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. — Charles Baudelaire

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. — Charles Baudelaire

Count Olaf: You should have given up a long time ago, orphans. I triumphed the moment you lost your family.
Violet: We didn't lose our family. Only our parents. — Lemony Snicket

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

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? — Charles Baudelaire

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! — Charles Baudelaire

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

So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love. — Charles Baudelaire

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist. — Charles Baudelaire

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty. — Charles Baudelaire

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. — Charles Baudelaire

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way. — Charles Baudelaire

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature. — Charles Baudelaire

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

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. — Charles Baudelaire

Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror. — Charles Baudelaire

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad! — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. — Charles Baudelaire

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

And over your unconsecrated head
you'll hear the howling wolves
lament their fate and yours the livelong year; — Charles Baudelaire

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

Nature ... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest. — Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky. — Charles Baudelaire

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches. — Charles Baudelaire

Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts,
Which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart — Charles Baudelaire

Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently. — Charles Baudelaire

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self. — Charles Baudelaire

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing. — Charles Baudelaire

Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious. — Charles Baudelaire

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it. — Charles Baudelaire

But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of "The Three Bears," for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand." [ ... ] and as the Baudelaire orphans sat and watched the dock fill with people as the business of the day began, they figured out something that was very important to them. It dawned on them that unlike Aunt Josephine, who had lived up in that house, sad and alone, the three children had one another for comfort and support over the course of their miserable lives. And while this did not make them feel entirely safe, or entirely happy, it made them feel appreciative. — Lemony Snicket

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country. — Charles Baudelaire

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers. — Charles Baudelaire

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling ... and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'. — Charles Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding. — Charles Baudelaire

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances. — Charles Baudelaire

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

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other. — David Almond

The priest is immense because he makes others believe in a heap of weird things. The Church wanting to do everything and be everything: it is a law of human spirit. Peoples adore authority. Priests are the servants and followers of imagination. The throne and the altar: revolutionary maxim. — Charles Baudelaire

Inspiration comes of working every day. — Charles Baudelaire

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed. — Charles Baudelaire

Color ... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned. — Charles Baudelaire

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues. — Charles Baudelaire

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother! — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

The room was a library. Not a public library, but a private library; that is, a collection of books belonging to Justice Strauss. There were shelves and shelves of them, on every wall from the floor to the ceiling, and separate shelves of them in the middle of the room. The only place were there weren't books was in one corner, where there were some large, comfortable-looking chairs and a wooden table with lamps hanging over them, perfect for reading. Although it was not as big as their parents library, it was cozy, and the Baudelaire children were thrilled. — Lemony Snicket

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