Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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51. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

59. “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

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

— 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. “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

63. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

65. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

67. “Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

70. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

80. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

82. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

84. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

86. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

88. “Le beau est toujours bizarre.”

— Charles Baudelaire

89. “Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!”

— Charles Baudelaire

90. “What is art? Prostitution.”

— Charles Baudelaire

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

94. “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

95. “To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.”

— Charles Baudelaire

96. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

97. “I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”

— Charles Baudelaire

98. “I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”

— Charles Baudelaire

99. “Genius 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 Baudelaire

100. “Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music.”

— Charles Baudelaire