Charles Baudelaire Quotes (126 Quotes)

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

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.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

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

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.

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

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.

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

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

Listen, my darling, listen to soft night approaching.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

I am swimming in dishonor like a fish in water.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

There exist only three respectable beings the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.

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.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

To lepers and to outcasts thou dost show - that passion is the paradise below

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.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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.

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

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of Number

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.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

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.

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

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

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

The witness of your might and virulence,
Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup
Of life and death my heart has drunken up!

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

Everything for me becomes allegory.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.