Charles Baudelaire Quotes

He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight - Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things!

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not?

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

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.

Minutes, foolish mortal, are the base mineral
that you must not let go of without extracting their gold!

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

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.

Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
Her breath is music faint and low.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

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.

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

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

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It's a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse.

God is a scandal, - a profitable scandal.

Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.

If 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 ... ?

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

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

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.

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

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.

THE OWLS
by: Charles Baudelaire
UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.
From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;
For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.

Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified

He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.

Music fathoms the sky.

Angel full of gaiety, do you know anguish? Angel

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general ... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

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.

I sing of calamitous dogs, those that wander among the winding ravines of great cities, or those whose sparkling, winning eyes have asked some misfit: "Take me with you, and our combined wretchedness might make some sort of happiness!

Passion sits on the skull
Of Humanity,
And this infidel enthroned
Laughs shamelessly,

And gaily blows round bubbles
That will fly,
As if to join with worlds
Deep in the sky.

Rising on high, the frail
Luminous globe,
Shatters and bursts its slim soul
Like a dream of gold.

I hear at each bubble, the skull
Moan and contend:
'This vicious, ridiculous game,
When will it end?

What you are blowing away
Again and again,
You murderous fiend, is my body
My blood and my brain!

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires
Sisyphean patience for its song,
Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short
and Art is long.

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

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.

Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

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

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.

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

Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!

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

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

But how you'd please me, night! without those stars
Whose light speaks in a language I have known!
Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare!

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.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Genius is childhood recovered at will.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

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

For I desire the dark, the naked, and the lone.

Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

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.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

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.

Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.

Music pierces the sky.

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

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

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you are happy only in your unhappiness?

-Anywhere, Out of this World

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.

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.

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.

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

The sap rises and, itself a mixture of elements, flowers in a mixture of tones; the trees, the rocks, the granites cast their reflections in the mirror of the water; all the transparent objects seize and imprison colour reflections, both close and distant, as the light passes through them. As the star of day moves, the tones change in value, but always they respect their mutual sympathies and natural hatreds, and continue to live in harmony by reciprocal concessions. The shadows move slowly and drive before them or blot out the tones as the light itself, changing position, sets others vibrating. These mingle their reflections, and, modifying their qualities by casting over them transparent and borrowed glazes, multiply to infinity their melodious marriages and make them easier to achieve. When the great ball of fire sinks into the waters, red fanfares fly in all directions, a blood-red harmony spreads over the horizon, green turns to a deep red. But soon vast blue shadows chase rhythmically before them the crowd of orange and soft tones, which are like the distant and muted echoes of the light. This great symphony of today, which is the eternally renewed variation of the symphony of yesterday, this succession of melodies, where the variety comes always from the infinite, this complex hymn is called colour.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling ... and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

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.

All 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.

In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care.

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté
Luxe, calme et volupté
There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

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.

Do 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.

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another; the artist never emerges from himself.

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

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

My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

Be wise, Oh my sadness, be calmer.

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.