Charles Baudelaire: Quotes about time

Charles Baudelaire was French poet. Explore interesting quotes on time.

Charles Baudelaire: 266 quotes20 likes

“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

“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

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

“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 book Le Spleen de Paris

Source: Paris Spleen

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

Charles Baudelaire

Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

“One can only forget about time by making use of it.”

Charles Baudelaire

On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

“An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.”

Charles Baudelaire

Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion. XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#IV L'art romantique (1869)

“Nature is a temple where living columns
Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. "Correspondances" [Correspondences] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondances Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

“In times of old when Nature in her glad excess
Brought forth such living marvels as no more are seen,
I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat about the feet of a queen.”

Charles Baudelaire La Géante

La Geante (1859)
Salon de 1859 (1859)

“Oh pain! Oh pain! Time eats life.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie. "L’Ennemi" [The Enemy] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal/1857/L%E2%80%99Ennemi Variant translations: Oh pain! Oh pain! Time eats our lives. Oh pain! Oh pain! Time is eating away my life. Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)