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Charles Baudelaire Quotes - Page 12

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Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

Charles Baudelaire
Childhood, Genius
Charles Baudelaire (1951). “My heart laid bare, and other prose writings”

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there Up there the wonderful clouds!

Charles Baudelaire
Mother, Country, Brother
Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (1970). “Paris Spleen, 1869”, p.1, New Directions Publishing

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Charles Baudelaire
Childhood, Genius

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
Sun, Moments, That Moment
Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.295, CUP Archive

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
Independent, Men, Ideas

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.

Charles Baudelaire
Morning, Fall, Winter

The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness.

Charles Baudelaire
Stupidity, Lazy, Talent

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

Charles Baudelaire
Photography, Art, Enemy

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Charles Baudelaire
Beautiful, Drunk, Madness

Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is the Dandy?

Charles Baudelaire
Eternal, Dandy, Superiority
Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.72, Courier Corporation

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

Charles Baudelaire
Beauty, Beautiful, Looks

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Charles Baudelaire
Beauty, Ambition, Goal

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.

Charles Baudelaire
Morning, Drinking, Flower
Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.14, David R. Godine Publisher

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

Charles Baudelaire
Queens, Imagination, Provinces

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Charles Baudelaire
Aristocracy, Literature, Ethics

A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes, Sweet bath, suavely Scented with ointments, has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.

Charles Baudelaire
Women, Hair, Hands
"Les paradis artificiels". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1860.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire
Art, Fleeting, Half
Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.403, CUP Archive

Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

Charles Baudelaire
Men, Hideous, Idleness

Quand me" me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e" tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me" me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.

Charles Baudelaire
Needs, Divine, Stills

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Charles Baudelaire
Brother, Book, Reading
Charles Baudelaire, Keith Waldrop (2006). “The Flowers of Evil”, p.36, Wesleyan University Press

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

Charles Baudelaire
Children, Self, Expression

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, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

Charles Baudelaire
Love Is, Men, Giving
Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (1970). “Paris Spleen, 1869”, p.20, New Directions Publishing

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
Gambling, Soul, Nuisance

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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

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

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