Authors:

Charles Baudelaire Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Ambition Art Atmosphere Autumn Beauty Childhood Children Church Dance Dancing Desire Devil Earth Effort Evil Fashion Feelings Funny Genius Giving Happiness Hate Heart Hell History Home Horror Idleness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Joy Language Life Literature Love Lying Madness Memories Moon Morning Nature Pain Passion Photography Pleasure Poetry Pride Progress Quality Reality Running Sin Sleep Solitude Soul Spring Study Stupidity Suffering Summer Terror Time Torture Universe Virtue War Water Wine Winter Work Writing
The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

Charles Baudelaire
Ants, Generations, Holes

From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen - The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?

Charles Baudelaire
Queens, Eye, Angel

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
Fate, Winter, Bored

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

Charles Baudelaire
Stars, Women, Philosophical

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.

Charles Baudelaire
Views, Political, Criticism
Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.

Charles Baudelaire
Wind, Insanity, Mind

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
Memories, Winter, Night
Charles Baudelaire, Norman R. Shapiro (2000). “Selected Poems from Les Fleurs Du Mal: A Bilingual Edition”, p.135, University of Chicago Press

Wine transforms moles into eagles.

Charles Baudelaire
Wine, Eagles, Moles

The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.

Charles Baudelaire
Men, Thoughtful, Love Is
Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds”

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

Charles Baudelaire
Believe, Passion, Thinking

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

Charles Baudelaire
Men, Narcissus, Metals
Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

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

Charles Baudelaire
Art, Literature, Imitating Others
Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.428, CUP Archive

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.

Charles Baudelaire
Dance, Believe, Ballet

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

Charles Baudelaire
Bourgeois

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Charles Baudelaire
Laughter, Hate, Heart

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
Knives, Poison, Arson
Charles Baudelaire (1955). “Flowers of Evil: A Selection”, p.5, New Directions Publishing

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Charles Baudelaire
Nice, Being Nice, Victim

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Charles Baudelaire
Crush, Beer, Earth
Charles Baudelaire (1919). “Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry”

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

Charles Baudelaire
Writing, Literature, Fifty

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire
Boredom, Boring, Amusing
"My Heart Laid Bare, and Other Prose Writings".

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

Charles Baudelaire
Desire, Bed, Literature
"The Essence of Laughter: And Other Essays, Journals, and Letters".

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

Charles Baudelaire
Moon, Cemetery

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
Latin, Dark, Dust
Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.165, David R. Godine Publisher

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
Dream, Reality, Fleeting
Charles Baudelaire (1996). “Artificial Paradises”, Citadel Press

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

Charles Baudelaire
Self, Centralization

You May Also Like: