Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear.”

— Charles Baudelaire

302. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

304. “God is a scandal, – a profitable scandal.”

— Charles Baudelaire

305. “You can live three days without bread – without poetry, never; and those of you who can say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds.”

— Charles Baudelaire

306. “The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”

— Charles Baudelaire

307. “Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace.”

— Charles Baudelaire

308. “She is unaware of Hell and Purgatory And when the time comes for her to enter The black Night, she will look into the face of Death As a new-born child, – without hatred or remorse.”

— Charles Baudelaire

309. “Romanticism is a grace, celestial or infernal, that bestows us eternal stigmata.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

311. “There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be ‘two’. The man of genius wants to be ‘one’... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls ‘the need to love’.”

— Charles Baudelaire

312. “Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, And cast God down upon the earth!”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

314. “The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since He is the supreme friend to every individual; since He is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.”

— Charles Baudelaire

315. “The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.”

— Charles Baudelaire

316. “The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.”

— Charles Baudelaire

317. “By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.”

— Charles Baudelaire

318. “He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui.”

— Charles Baudelaire

319. “Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, – in the atmosphere of the great days. – It must be something soothing, – even serene in its passion. – Regions of pure Poetry.”

— Charles Baudelaire

320. “Samuel was, more than all the others, the man of failed works of beauty; – a fantastical and sickly creature, whose poetry shines forth much more in his person than in his works, and who, around one o’clock in the morning, between the dazzling of a coal fire and the clock’s tick-tock, always seemed to be the god of impotence, – a modern and hermaphrodite god, – so colossal an impotence, so enormous, reaching epic proportions!”

— Charles Baudelaire

321. “Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.”

— Charles Baudelaire

322. “He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”

— Charles Baudelaire

323. “Genius is merely childhood recollected at will.”

— Charles Baudelaire

324. “Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk – on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.”

— Charles Baudelaire

325. “Take it easy, Sadness. Settle down.”

— Charles Baudelaire

326. “Nature can counsel nothing but crime.”

— Charles Baudelaire

327. “I’m the vampire of my own heart – One of those utter derelicts Condemned to eternal laughter, But who can no longer smile!”

— Charles Baudelaire

328. “Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.”

— Charles Baudelaire

329. “In all climes, under every sun, Death admires you At your antics, ridiculous Humanity, And frequently, like you, scenting herself with myrrh, Mingles her irony with your insanity!”

— Charles Baudelaire

330. “Man – all mankind, that is to say – is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from universal degradation than from the establishment of a reasonable hierarchy.”

— Charles Baudelaire

331. “I love recalling those antique, nude times.”

— Charles Baudelaire

332. “The Alchemy of Grief.”

— Charles Baudelaire

333. “Poor sisters – yea, I love you as I pity you, For your unsatiated thirsts and anguished sighs, And for the vials of love within your hearts so true.”

— Charles Baudelaire

334. “Her Hair O tumble to the collarbone, O fleece, O locks, O fragrance full of “I don’t care,” what ecstasy! To stuff a gloomy place with all I know is rife within this mass, I’ll shake it like a kerchief in the air.”

— Charles Baudelaire

335. “Il est plus difficile d’aimer Dieu que de croire en lui.”

— Charles Baudelaire

336. “Impassive clock! Terrifying, sinister god, Whose finger threatens us and says: “Remember!”

— Charles Baudelaire

337. “Our close reunion will create poetry. Between us we shall make a god.”

— Charles Baudelaire

338. “Car je cherche le vide, el le noir, el le nu!”

— Charles Baudelaire

339. “In the evening streamed down the radiant sun, That great eye which stares from the inquisitive sky. From behind the window that scattered its bright rays It seemed to gaze upon our long, quiet dinners, Spreading wide its candle-like reflections On the frugal table-cloth and the serge curtains.”

— Charles Baudelaire

340. “The Metamorphoses of the Vampire.”

— Charles Baudelaire

341. “This morning I was so rash as to read some of the public newspapers; suddenly an indolence of the weight of twenty atmospheres fell upon me, and I was stopped, faced by the appalling uselessness of explaining anything whatever to anyone whatever. Those who know can divine me, and for those who can not or will not understand, it would be fruitless to pile up explanations.”

— Charles Baudelaire

342. “They have the divine eyes of little girls Who are amazed and laugh at everything that gleams.”

— Charles Baudelaire

343. “My heart is a palace pillaged by the herd; They kill and take each other by the throat!”

— Charles Baudelaire

344. “Patent symbols, perfect picture Of an irremediable fate Which makes one think that the Devil Always does well whatever he does!”

— Charles Baudelaire

345. “In love with pleasure to the point of cruelty, See! I drag along also! but, more dazed than they, I say: “What do they seek in Heaven, all those blind?”

— Charles Baudelaire

346. “Her tint, pale and warm – this bewitching bride, Displays a nobly nurtured mien, Courageous and grand like a huntsman, her stride; A tranquil smile and eyes serene.”

— Charles Baudelaire

347. “It was easy for Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to declare war on Wagner’s adverse critics. This Baudelaire did.”

— Charles Baudelaire

348. “In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original – and they give the impression of being original works – Stedman agreed with Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English.”

— Charles Baudelaire

349. “Babel of stairways and arcades, it was an endless palace, full of reservoirs and cascades falling into a dull and darkened gold; and heavy cataracts, like crystal curtains, hung, in shimmering light, on metal walls.”

— Charles Baudelaire

350. “A hellish, ironic beacon, Torch of satanical blessings, Sole glory and only solace – The consciousness of doing evil.”

— Charles Baudelaire