Charles Baudelaire Quotes (126 Quotes)


    As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

    Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

    I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.


    This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.



    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.





    The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

    A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

    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.

    I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

    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.

    Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.


    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.

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

    In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.



    Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.


    I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.


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

    As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . then they fall down the curtains.

    The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

    It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

    If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

    The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

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

    On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.



    To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

    Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

    We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

    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.

    There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.


    Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

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

    Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter molecules do not constitute form.

    Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of ou.

    God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

    What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.



    More Charles Baudelaire Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Art - Beauty - Literature - Man - Life - Nature - Poetry - Infinity - Angels - Sense & Perception - Good & Evil - Poets - Love - Religions & Spirituality - Work & Career - Wine - Contingency - Eternity - Vice & Virtue - View All Charles Baudelaire Quotations

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    T. S. Eliot - Rabindranath Tagore - Horace - Thomas Moore - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Robert Burns - Rainer Maria Rilke - Octavio Paz - Elizabeth Bishop - Edward Young


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