When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.
Charles BaudelaireGenius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.
Charles BaudelaireIn putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
Charles BaudelaireBoth ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
Charles BaudelaireIn philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.
Charles BaudelaireGenius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
Charles BaudelaireBlessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.
Charles BaudelaireThe idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.
Charles BaudelaireModernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles BaudelaireWe 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 BaudelaireTo 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.
Charles BaudelaireDandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.
Charles BaudelaireBeware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness...Love should be love.
Charles BaudelaireTo the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles BaudelaireThe more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Charles BaudelaireDo you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.
Charles BaudelaireOur religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
Charles BaudelaireThe immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.
Charles BaudelaireDelacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.
Charles Baudelairethe Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
Charles BaudelaireFrance at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles BaudelaireArt is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
Charles BaudelaireA friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Charles BaudelaireIt is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles BaudelaireFrom his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily.
Charles BaudelaireRelate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.
Charles BaudelaireThe Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
Charles BaudelaireEven if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Charles BaudelaireAll 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.
Charles BaudelaireIf wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?
Charles BaudelaireWho among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.
Charles BaudelaireDrowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.
Charles BaudelaireAbove my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
Charles Baudelaire