Charles Baudelaire Quotes

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Charles Baudelaire
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
Charles Baudelaire
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
Charles Baudelaire
Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire
Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire
The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.
Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that he can sleep.
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
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that he can sleep.
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
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
Charles Baudelaire
We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.
Charles Baudelaire
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
Charles Baudelaire
In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
Charles Baudelaire
Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
Charles Baudelaire
He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
Charles Baudelaire
SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.Du bouffon favori la grotesque balladeNe distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilettePour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais puDe son être extirper l'élément corrompu,Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéOù coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,one who escapes his tutor's monologues,and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,our tyrants' solace in senility,he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)
Charles Baudelaire
Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?
Charles Baudelaire
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Charles Baudelaire
It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.
Charles Baudelaire
I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.
Charles Baudelaire
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
Charles Baudelaire
Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.
Charles Baudelaire
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Charles Baudelaire
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
Charles Baudelaire
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire
I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
Charles Baudelaire
He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.
Charles Baudelaire
And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.
Charles Baudelaire
Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.
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
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Charles Baudelaire
The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.
Charles Baudelaire
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Charles Baudelaire
The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
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
Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.
Charles Baudelaire
The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Charles Baudelaire
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!
Charles Baudelaire
The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.
Charles Baudelaire
The mainspring of genius is curiosity.
Charles Baudelaire
To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.
Charles Baudelaire
Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.
Charles Baudelaire
I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.
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
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire
Music fathoms the sky.
Charles Baudelaire
Nature can counsel nothing but crime.
Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.
Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
Charles Baudelaire
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
Charles Baudelaire
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
Charles Baudelaire