Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 8

51. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

54. “The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”

— Charles Baudelaire

55. “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

58. “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”

— Charles Baudelaire

59. “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans. IhavemorememoriesthanifIwereonethousandyearsold.”

— Charles Baudelaire

60. “Art 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 Baudelaire

61. “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

63. “Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.”

— Charles Baudelaire

64. “What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

— Charles Baudelaire

65. “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

66. “What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.”

— Charles Baudelaire

67. “From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make – fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen – The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

69. “The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.”

— Charles Baudelaire

70. “Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

— Charles Baudelaire

71. “What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”

— Charles Baudelaire

72. “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.”

— Charles Baudelaire

73. “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

— Charles Baudelaire

74. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

75. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

76. “What is it that brings on these moods of yours? Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.”

— Charles Baudelaire

77. “How bittersweet it is, on winter’s night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.”

— Charles Baudelaire

78. “Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

81. “Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.”

— Charles Baudelaire

82. “Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”

— Charles Baudelaire

83. “Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”

— Charles Baudelaire

84. “Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”

— Charles Baudelaire

85. “Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.”

— Charles Baudelaire

86. “The world only goes round by misunderstanding.”

— Charles Baudelaire

87. “There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

89. “Le beau est toujours bizarre.”

— Charles Baudelaire

90. “That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.”

— Charles Baudelaire

91. “As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”

— Charles Baudelaire

92. “Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes give voice to confused words;.”

— Charles Baudelaire

93. “How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.”

— Charles Baudelaire

94. “Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!”

— Charles Baudelaire

95. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

96. “What is art? Prostitution.”

— Charles Baudelaire

97. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

98. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

99. “Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.”

— Charles Baudelaire

100. “Alas! Man’s vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.”

— Charles Baudelaire