Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful...”

— Charles Baudelaire

252. “However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.”

— Charles Baudelaire

253. “Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”

— Charles Baudelaire

254. “That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

256. “It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.”

— Charles Baudelaire

257. “Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

260. “On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.”

— Charles Baudelaire

261. “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

262. “Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

264. “A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

— Charles Baudelaire

265. “Wine transforms moles into eagles.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

273. “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

274. “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

275. “The People adore authority.”

— Charles Baudelaire

276. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

278. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

284. “The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman; When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

286. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

289. “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

290. “The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

294. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

299. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire