Charles Baudelaire Quotes

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

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

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.

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

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.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.

A silent mouth is sweet to hear.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

We are all born marked for evil.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

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.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

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

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.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

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

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.

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

Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own.

On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

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.