Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.”

— Charles Baudelaire

152. “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

153. “Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

154. “Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.”

— Charles Baudelaire

155. “I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t’embrasser neuf fois.”

— Charles Baudelaire

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

164. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

166. “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

167. “Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

169. “Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.”

— Charles Baudelaire

170. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

174. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

181. “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

182. “Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

185. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

197. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire