Top 350 Charles Baudelaire Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

305. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

309. “Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

319. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

321. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

323. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

325. “Nature can counsel nothing but crime.”

— Charles Baudelaire

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

331. “The Alchemy of Grief.”

— Charles Baudelaire

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

337. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

339. “The Metamorphoses of the Vampire.”

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

343. “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

344. “Thy laughter soaked in tears which no one sees.”

— Charles Baudelaire

345. “O Beauty! dost thou generate from Heaven or from Hell? Within thy glance, so diabolic and divine, Confusedly both wickedness and goodness dwell, And hence one might compare thee unto sparkling wine.”

— Charles Baudelaire

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

350. “Che belli i soli nelle calde sere!”

— Charles Baudelaire