Baudelaire Charles Quotes & Sayings

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

Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust. — 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

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

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general ... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star. — 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

- 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

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it. — Charles Baudelaire

I am the vampire at my own veins. — Charles Baudelaire

When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you! — Charles Baudelaire

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures. — Charles Baudelaire

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we're indifferent to whether we win or lose? — Charles Baudelaire

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare. — Charles Baudelaire

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

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants. — Charles Baudelaire

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music. — 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

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty. — 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

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed. — 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

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

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

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

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

Music fathoms the sky. — Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration comes of working every day. — Charles Baudelaire