Paris Spleen Quotes

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“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, Paris Spleen

“L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poemes En Prose

“L'etude du beau est un duel ou l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'etre vaincu.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris - Les Paradis Artificiels

“Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là : c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“…all these things think through me, or I think through them (for, in the grandeur of reverie, the I is soon lost); they think, I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibble, without syllogism, without deduction.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris - Les Paradis Artificiels

“The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“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, Paris Spleen

“A czy to ma znaczenie, jaka jest naprawdę otaczająca mnie rzeczywistość, jeżeli pomogła mi żyć, czuć, że jestem, i czuć, kim jestem?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu’il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre.
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.

(N'importe où hors du monde)”
― Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris - Les Paradis Artificiels

“Hay mujeres que inspiran deseos de vencerlas o de gozarlas; pero ésta infunde el deseo de morir lentamente ante sus ojos.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“لأي شيطـــــان حنـــــون أديـــن بكونــي محاطــــــاً هكـــذا بالســــر،بالصمــــت،وبالعطــــور؟
شارل بودلير / سأم باريس”
― شارل بودلير, Paris Spleen

“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.

It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul

"Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!"

My soul does not reply.

"Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?"

My soul remains mute.

"Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty."

Not a word. -- Is my soul dead?

Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!"

Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: "It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“El que no sabe poblar su soledad, tampoco sabe estar solo en una muchedumbre atareada.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Déjame morder mucho tiempo tus trenzas, pesadas y negras. Cuando mosdisqueo tus cabellos elásticos y rebeldes, me parece que como recuerdos.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“All history and all mythology pandering to gluttony.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen