Charles Baudelaire: Citations en anglais (Page 3)

“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.”

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

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

“Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.”

“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”

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”