Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

52. “It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.”

— Charles Baudelaire

53. “Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.”

— Charles Baudelaire

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

58. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

62. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

68. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

70. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

73. “Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

75. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

80. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

82. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “The 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 Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

95. “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

96. “Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

98. “What is art? Prostitution.”

— Charles Baudelaire

99. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire