Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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251. “Wine transforms moles into eagles.”

— Charles Baudelaire

252. “In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

253. “Listen, my dear – with soft step the night hears.”

— Charles Baudelaire

254. “Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.”

— Charles Baudelaire

255. “The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.”

— Charles Baudelaire

256. “Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.”

— Charles Baudelaire

257. “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

258. “There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.”

— Charles Baudelaire

259. “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

260. “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

261. “The one vice beyond redemption is to do bad things out of stupidity.”

— Charles Baudelaire

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.”

— Charles Baudelaire

265. “For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.”

— Charles Baudelaire

266. “In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care.”

— Charles Baudelaire

267. “If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.”

— Charles Baudelaire

268. “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

269. “It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”

— Charles Baudelaire

270. “To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.”

— Charles Baudelaire

271. “In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.”

— Charles Baudelaire

272. “Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.”

— Charles Baudelaire

273. “Be wise, Oh my sadness, be calmer.”

— Charles Baudelaire

274. “Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.”

— Charles Baudelaire

275. “Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.”

— Charles Baudelaire

276. “It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.”

— Charles Baudelaire

277. “I sing of calamitous dogs, those that wander among the winding ravines of great cities, or those whose sparkling, winning eyes have asked some misfit: “Take me with you, and our combined wretchedness might make some sort of happiness!”

— Charles Baudelaire

278. “Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”

— Charles Baudelaire

279. “Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.”

— Charles Baudelaire

280. “Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

281. “All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.”

— Charles Baudelaire

282. “The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.”

— Charles Baudelaire

283. “I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?”

— Charles Baudelaire

284. “In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.”

— Charles Baudelaire

285. “As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.”

— Charles Baudelaire

286. “It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.”

— Charles Baudelaire

287. “I love to think of those naked epochs Whose statues Phoebus liked to tinge with gold. At that time men and women, lithe and strong, Tasted the thrill of love free from care and prudery, And with the amorous sun caressing their loins They gloried in the health of their noble bodies.”

— Charles Baudelaire

288. “Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!”

— Charles Baudelaire

289. “An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.”

— Charles Baudelaire

290. “The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.”

— Charles Baudelaire

291. “I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life.”

— Charles Baudelaire

292. “I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans; I hate movement for it displaces lines, And never do I weep and never do I laugh.”

— Charles Baudelaire

293. “France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.”

— Charles Baudelaire

294. “The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear.”

— Charles Baudelaire

295. “Only when we drink poison are we well.”

— Charles Baudelaire

296. “In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

297. “Art dulls the terror of the void better than anything else.”

— Charles Baudelaire

298. “Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace.”

— Charles Baudelaire

299. “An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.”

— Charles Baudelaire

300. “A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way...”

— Charles Baudelaire