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. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Charles Baudelaire on love, law, dark.
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.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
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.
Charles Baudelaire inspirational quote
Charles Baudelaire Image Quotes
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle. — Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Short Quotes
Always be a poet, even in prose.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
Everything for me becomes allegory
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Charles Baudelaire Quotes About Love
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. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love. — Charles Baudelaire
The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight. — Charles Baudelaire
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
When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you! — Charles Baudelaire
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self. — Charles Baudelaire
A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it. — Charles Baudelaire
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. — Charles Baudelaire
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. — Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Quotes About Beauty
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. — Charles Baudelaire
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton. — Charles Baudelaire
It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures. — Charles Baudelaire
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction. — Charles Baudelaire
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. — Charles Baudelaire
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. — Charles Baudelaire
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! — Charles Baudelaire
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste. — Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Quotes About Work
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. — Charles Baudelaire
The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief. — Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. — Charles Baudelaire
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. — Charles Baudelaire
Inspiration comes of working every day. — 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 for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results. — Charles Baudelaire
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. — Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art. — Charles Baudelaire
As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
The world only goes round by misunderstanding. — Charles Baudelaire
Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it. — Charles Baudelaire
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah. — Charles Baudelaire
The world progresses only through misunderstanding. — Charles Baudelaire
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs. — Charles Baudelaire
Certes, je sortirai quant a' moi satisfait D'un monde o u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re" ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream. — Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Quotes About Life
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
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. — Charles Baudelaire
Life swarms with innocent monsters. — Charles Baudelaire
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
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. — Charles Baudelaire
Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things! — Charles Baudelaire
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. — Charles Baudelaire
Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path. — Charles Baudelaire
Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable. — Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Famous Quotes And Sayings
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
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle. — 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. — Charles Baudelaire
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise. — Charles Baudelaire
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. — Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. — Charles Baudelaire
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches. — Charles Baudelaire
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air. — Charles Baudelaire
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight? — Charles Baudelaire
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes. — Charles Baudelaire
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
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal. — Charles Baudelaire
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end. — Charles Baudelaire
There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions. — Charles Baudelaire
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies. — Charles Baudelaire
Discover day to day excitement. — Charles Baudelaire
Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling. — Charles Baudelaire
But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go! — Charles Baudelaire
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized. — Charles Baudelaire
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
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa. — Charles Baudelaire
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things. — Charles Baudelaire
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. — Charles Baudelaire
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people. — Charles Baudelaire
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born. — Charles Baudelaire
I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness. — Charles Baudelaire
Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn. — Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recalled at will. — Charles Baudelaire
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
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character. — Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. — Charles Baudelaire
However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it. — Charles Baudelaire
The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future. — Charles Baudelaire
Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes. — Charles Baudelaire
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men. — Charles Baudelaire
What is art? Prostitution. — Charles Baudelaire
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial. — Charles Baudelaire
Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness. — Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected. — Charles Baudelaire
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation. — Charles Baudelaire
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust. — Charles Baudelaire
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
I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed. — Charles Baudelaire
Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers. — Charles Baudelaire
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. — Charles Baudelaire
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. — Charles Baudelaire
If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible. — Charles Baudelaire
For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty. — Charles Baudelaire
The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education. — Charles Baudelaire
Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another. — Charles Baudelaire
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them. — Charles Baudelaire
The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror. — Charles Baudelaire
Life Lessons by Charles Baudelaire
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.
Citation
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