Charles Baudelaire Quotes
French - Poet April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867



Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

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

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Charles Baudelaire

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
Charles Baudelaire

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Charles Baudelaire

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Charles Baudelaire

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

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles Baudelaire

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
Charles Baudelaire

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Charles Baudelaire

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
Charles Baudelaire

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles Baudelaire

Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
Charles Baudelaire

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Charles Baudelaire

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Charles Baudelaire

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire

Progress, this great heresy of decay.
Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
Charles Baudelaire

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire