Charles Baudelaire was a French poet and author from the 19th century. He is best known for his collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, which explored themes of death, morality, and beauty. His works were highly influential to the Symbolist and modernist movements in literature.
What is the most famous quote by Charles Baudelaire ?
Nothing can be done except little by little.
— Charles Baudelaire
What can you learn from Charles Baudelaire (Life Lessons)
- Charles Baudelaire encourages us to embrace beauty in the world around us and to appreciate the transient nature of life.
- He also emphasizes the importance of living in the moment and to not be afraid of taking risks and exploring the unknown.
- Finally, he reminds us to be mindful of our actions and to strive to achieve our highest potential.
The most astounding Charles Baudelaire quotes that are easy to memorize and remember
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Charles Baudelaire inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Charles Baudelaire.
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.
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.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
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.
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.
Dark quotes by Charles Baudelaire
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
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.
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables.
It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
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.
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.
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.
Quotations by Charles Baudelaire that are existential and provocative
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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 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.
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.
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.
Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
Everything for me becomes allegory
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
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.
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
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.
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.