Charles Baudelaire Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Charles Baudelaire's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Charles Baudelaire's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 357 quotes on this page collected since April 9, 1821! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • The People adore authority.

    Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.32, Courier Corporation
  • La' , tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute , Luxe, calme et volupte . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

  • A Dandy does nothing.

    Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.74, Courier Corporation
  • It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance

    Charles Baudelaire (1961). “Baudelaire: Introduced and edited by Francis Scarfe, with plain prose translations of each poem”
  • Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.

  • When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.

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

  • There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

    "L'art romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.
  • Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

    Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.428, CUP Archive
  • We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

    Charles Baudelaire (1956). “The Essence of Laughter: And Other Essays, Journals, and Letters”
  • My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

  • To be a great man and a saint to oneself, that's the only important thing.

    "The Essence of Laughter: And Other Essays, Journals, and Letters".
  • 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.

    Eye  
    "L'art romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.
  • I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

  • The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

    Charles Baudelaire (1986). “La Fanfarlo”
  • The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

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

  • 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, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.14, David R. Godine Publisher
  • The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

  • Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.

  • Evil comes up softly like a flower.

    Charles Baudelaire (1926). “Baudelaire, Prose and Poetry”
  • Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

    "Salon de 1859". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1859.
  • Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

    Charles Baudelaire (1951). “My heart laid bare, and other prose writings”
  • Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

    Cat   Eye   Dust  
    Charles Baudelaire (1991). “The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen: Poems”, Boa Editions
  • 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.

    Charles Baudelaire, “Anywhere Out Of The World”
  • An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

    Charles Baudelaire (2012). “The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen: Selected Poems”, p.63, Courier Corporation
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 357 quotes from the Poet Charles Baudelaire, starting from April 9, 1821! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!