Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Charles Baudelaire
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Charles Baudelaire
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Charles Baudelaire
The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes so embarrassing that I suffered, upon losing it, a little less emotion than if I had mislaid, while out on a stroll, my calling-card.

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

Charles Baudelaire
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

Charles Baudelaire
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.

Charles Baudelaire
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Charles Baudelaire
What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

Charles Baudelaire
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

Charles Baudelaire
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Charles Baudelaire
What do I care that you are good?
Be beautiful! and be sad!

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
There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness and pleasure.

Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire
The poet is like the prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

Charles Baudelaire
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

Charles Baudelaire
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome.

Charles Baudelaire
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Charles Baudelaire
O Death, old captain, it is time! raise the anchor!

Charles Baudelaire
Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

Charles Baudelaire
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.

Charles Baudelaire
All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.

Charles Baudelaire
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.

Charles Baudelaire
Everything there is simply order and beauty, luxury, peace and sensual indulgence.

Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

Charles Baudelaire
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.

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

Charles Baudelaire