Charles Baudelaire > Quotes

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude of your own room,
you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“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

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

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

“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
― Charles Baudelaire

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

“a multitude of small delights constitute happiness”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“you walk on corpses, Beauty, undismayed,”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― 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, Artificial Paradises

“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, & which life reveals is the most living proof of our immortality.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.”
― 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, Les Fleurs Du Mal

“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, The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays

“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

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

“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.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal

“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. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté
Luxe, calme et volupté
There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.”
― Charles Baudelaire

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

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals

“All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“THE OWLS

by: Charles Baudelaire

UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Dieu est le seul être qui, pour règner, n'a même pas besoin d'exister.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Inspiration comes of working every day.”
― 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, Selected Writings on Art and Literature

“In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pédéraste.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“...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, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen