Charles Baudelaire - Man Quotes

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

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
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
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
The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.

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
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the one important thing.

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

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
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.

Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Charles Baudelaire
Inspiration always comes when a man really wants it to, but it doesn't always go when he wants.

Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple, where, from living pillars, confused words are sometimes allowed to escape; here man passes, through forests of symbols, which watch him with looks of recognition.

Charles Baudelaire
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

Charles Baudelaire
Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.

Charles Baudelaire
There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan.

Charles Baudelaire
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recalled at will. Childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience.

Charles Baudelaire
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

Charles Baudelaire