Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Charles Baudelaire
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

Charles Baudelaire
Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

Charles Baudelaire
There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

Charles Baudelaire
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

Charles Baudelaire
In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

Charles Baudelaire
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.

Charles Baudelaire
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Charles Baudelaire
We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

Charles Baudelaire
Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!

Charles Baudelaire
Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.

Charles Baudelaire
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

Charles Baudelaire
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

Charles Baudelaire
The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.

Charles Baudelaire
What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

Charles Baudelaire
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.

Charles Baudelaire
What is it that brings on these moods of yours?
Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.

Charles Baudelaire
As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.

Charles Baudelaire
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this:... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

Charles Baudelaire
There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.

Charles Baudelaire
Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.

Charles Baudelaire
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

Charles Baudelaire
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

Charles Baudelaire
How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,
To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.

Charles Baudelaire
I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

Charles Baudelaire
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.

Charles Baudelaire
An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

Charles Baudelaire
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

Charles Baudelaire
If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.

Charles Baudelaire