Charles baudelaire quotes

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

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.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

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 the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Strangeness is an ingredient necessary in beauty.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

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

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

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

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.

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

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

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

Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

A silent mouth is sweet to hear.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

Always be drunk ... Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always the product of skill.

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

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

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.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

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.

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.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

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.

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

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

Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

Discover day to day excitement.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

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

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

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 a essential part and characteristic of beauty.

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

From his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily.

I am the vampire at my own veins.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

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.

No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.

The People adore authority.

Music fathoms the sky.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

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

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

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.

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

Everything for me becomes allegory

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

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

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

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

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.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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.

Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.