Charles Baudelaire Quotes

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

“Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.”

“Through the unknown, we'll find the new.”

“Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?”

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

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

“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.”

“You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.”

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

“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.”

“the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love”

“And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;
and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.”

“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.”

“Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.”

“The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.”

“Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!”

“There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfuly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”

“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.”

“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”

“I am a cemetery loathed by the moon.”

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

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

“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness”

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

“Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.”

“I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.”

“He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!”

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

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”

“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”

“It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.”

“Inspiration comes of working every day.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.”

“And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”

“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”

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

“That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.”

“Hypocrite reader — my likeness — my brother!”

“This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.”

“Music fathoms the sky.”

“We revel in the laxness of the path we take.”

“How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?”

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”

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

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

“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.”

“Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.”

“The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.”

“There are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan.”