Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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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
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

Charles Baudelaire
That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.

Charles Baudelaire
To be a serviceable man has always seemed to me something quite repulsive.

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

Charles Baudelaire
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Charles Baudelaire
If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!

Charles Baudelaire
And the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.

Charles Baudelaire
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

Charles Baudelaire
Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material.

Charles Baudelaire
What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough?

Charles Baudelaire
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.

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

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
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

Charles Baudelaire
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire
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.

Charles Baudelaire
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Of photography

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

Charles Baudelaire
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Charles Baudelaire
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.

Charles Baudelaire
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

Charles Baudelaire