Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

2. “Nothing can be done except little by little.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Persistence Quotes

3. “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”

— Charles Baudelaire

4. “Always be a poet, even in prose.”

— Charles Baudelaire

5. “The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

— Charles Baudelaire

6. “La’, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute, Luxe, calme et volupte. There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.”

— Charles Baudelaire

7. “Inspiration comes of working every day.”

— Charles Baudelaire

8. “Through the Unknown, we’ll find the New.”

— Charles Baudelaire

9. “What is love? The need of coming out of one’s self.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

11. “Music fathoms the sky.”

— Charles Baudelaire

12. “A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.”

— Charles Baudelaire

13. “I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.”

— Charles Baudelaire

14. “It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Quotes About Childhood

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

— Charles Baudelaire

17. “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”

— Charles Baudelaire

18. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”

— Charles Baudelaire

19. “The beautiful is always bizarre.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

21. “My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

22. “I am the vampire at my own veins.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

24. “Evil comes up softly like a flower.”

— Charles Baudelaire

25. “A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.”

— Charles Baudelaire

26. “Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalite ; le bien est toujours le produit d’un art. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it’s destiny; good is always a product of art.”

— Charles Baudelaire

27. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

29. “There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.”

— Charles Baudelaire

30. “The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.”

— Charles Baudelaire

31. “Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Virtue Quotes

32. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”

— Charles Baudelaire

33. “Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.”

— Charles Baudelaire

34. “There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Respect Quotes

35. “Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult’s capacities.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Quotes About Childhood

36. “This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

38. “All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.”

— Charles Baudelaire

39. “A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”

— Charles Baudelaire

41. “What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

43. “The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.”

— Charles Baudelaire

44. “Le beau est toujours bizarre.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

46. “Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.”

— Charles Baudelaire

47. “A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

49. “Etre un homme utile m’a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux. To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.”

— Charles Baudelaire

50. “We are all born marked for evil.”

— Charles Baudelaire