Charles Baudelaire Quotes

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

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.

The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance

Music fathoms the sky.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

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.

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

The insatiable thirst for everything that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

A Dandy does nothing.

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.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

Nothing can be done except little by little.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

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!

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

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

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.

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.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

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.

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.

My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!

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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

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.

The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.

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.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.