Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “As a remedy against all ills – poverty, sickness, and melancholy – only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.”

— Charles Baudelaire

202. “To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

204. “No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.”

— Charles Baudelaire

205. “Even if it were proven that God didn’t exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”

— Charles Baudelaire

206. “Everything for me becomes allegory.”

— Charles Baudelaire

207. “Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

209. “In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one’s eyes. It becomes its symbol.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

211. “I lived for a long time under vast porticos That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires, And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous In the evening made seem like basaltic caves.”

— Charles Baudelaire

212. “The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

213. “Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house?”

— Charles Baudelaire

214. “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

216. “To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.”

— Charles Baudelaire

217. “The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.”

— Charles Baudelaire

218. “I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.”

— Charles Baudelaire

219. “Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.”

— Charles Baudelaire

220. “Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

221. “The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.”

— Charles Baudelaire

222. “Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”

— Charles Baudelaire

223. “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.”

— Charles Baudelaire

224. “For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”

— Charles Baudelaire

225. “How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!”

— Charles Baudelaire

226. “There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”

— Charles Baudelaire

227. “Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?”

— Charles Baudelaire

228. “These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.”

— Charles Baudelaire

229. “So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love.”

— Charles Baudelaire

230. “A Dandy does nothing.”

— Charles Baudelaire

231. “What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!”

— Charles Baudelaire

232. “He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.”

— Charles Baudelaire

233. “THE CAT Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart; Hold back the talons of your paws, Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes Of metal and agate. When my fingers leisurely caress you, Your head and your elastic back, And when my hand tingles with the pleasure Of feeling your electric body, In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze Like your own, amiable beast, Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart, And, from her head down to her feet, A subtle air, a dangerous perfume Floats about her dusky body.”

— Charles Baudelaire

234. “A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.”

— Charles Baudelaire

235. “Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.”

— Charles Baudelaire

236. “There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”

— Charles Baudelaire

237. “There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.”

— Charles Baudelaire

238. “Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.”

— Charles Baudelaire

239. “When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!”

— Charles Baudelaire

240. “There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.”

— Charles Baudelaire

241. “The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.”

— Charles Baudelaire

242. “It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.”

— Charles Baudelaire

243. “All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.”

— Charles Baudelaire

244. “The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.”

— Charles Baudelaire

245. “In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.”

— Charles Baudelaire

246. “The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.”

— Charles Baudelaire

247. “Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.”

— Charles Baudelaire

248. “There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

249. “I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.”

— Charles Baudelaire

250. “In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful...”

— Charles Baudelaire