Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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151. “We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

153. “To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”

— Charles Baudelaire

154. “If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

155. “Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.”

— Charles Baudelaire

156. “It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.”

— Charles Baudelaire

157. “Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is the Dandy?”

— Charles Baudelaire

158. “Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.”

— Charles Baudelaire

159. “What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”

— Charles Baudelaire

160. “Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”

— Charles Baudelaire

161. “Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom.”

— Charles Baudelaire

162. “You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.”

— Charles Baudelaire

163. “I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.”

— Charles Baudelaire

164. “Within the bottle’s depths, the wine’s soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.”

— Charles Baudelaire

165. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

166. “The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”

— Charles Baudelaire

167. “Avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?”

— Charles Baudelaire

168. “Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.”

— Charles Baudelaire

169. “If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.”

— Charles Baudelaire

170. “It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”

— Charles Baudelaire

171. “On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.”

— Charles Baudelaire

172. “Dis-moi, ton coeur parfois s’envole-t-il, Agathe!”

— Charles Baudelaire

173. “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

174. “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.”

— Charles Baudelaire

175. “In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.”

— Charles Baudelaire

176. “Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

178. “Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”

— Charles Baudelaire

179. “Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

181. “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!”

— Charles Baudelaire

182. “If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.”

— Charles Baudelaire

183. “Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.”

— Charles Baudelaire

184. “The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.”

— Charles Baudelaire

185. “Progress, this great heresy of decay.”

— Charles Baudelaire

186. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

187. “L’imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.”

— Charles Baudelaire

188. “Comme l’imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

189. “Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

191. “I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.”

— Charles Baudelaire

192. “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.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

194. “You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue – take your pick. But be drunk.”

— Charles Baudelaire

195. “For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.”

— Charles Baudelaire

196. “Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.”

— Charles Baudelaire

197. “Everything for me becomes allegory.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

199. “We revel in the laxness of the path we take.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire