Quotes by Baudelaire, Charles




Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 August 31, 1867) was one of the most influential French poets of the nineteenth Century. He was also an important critic, and translator..

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

Baudelaire, Charles on evil
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"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

Baudelaire, Charles on fantasy
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"All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind."

Baudelaire, Charles on fashion    Share

"I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card."

Baudelaire, Charles on gambling
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"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."

Baudelaire, Charles on genius
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"As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work."

Baudelaire, Charles on health
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"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on immortality    Share

"There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite."

Baudelaire, Charles on infinity    Share

"A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else."

Baudelaire, Charles on art    Share

"The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute."

Baudelaire, Charles on art    Share

"It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair."

Baudelaire, Charles on love
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"The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find."

Baudelaire, Charles on love
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"I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me."

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

Baudelaire, Charles on modern and modernism    Share

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

Baudelaire, Charles on nature    Share

"Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility."

Baudelaire, Charles on originality
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"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on poetry and poets    Share

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

Baudelaire, Charles on poetry and poets    Share

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

Baudelaire, Charles on prayer
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"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on present    Share

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

Baudelaire, Charles on reason
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"Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul."

Baudelaire, Charles on rejection
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"We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized."

Baudelaire, Charles on republican    Share

"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on romance and romanticism    Share

"True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin."

Baudelaire, Charles on sin    Share

"There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."

Baudelaire, Charles on beauty
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"Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!"

Baudelaire, Charles on books - reading    Share

"Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."

Baudelaire, Charles on bores and boredom    Share

"For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."

Baudelaire, Charles on business    Share

"Our religion is itself profoundly sad -- a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language -- so long as he knows anguish and is a painter."

Baudelaire, Charles on catholicism    Share

"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform."

Baudelaire, Charles on symbols    Share

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

Baudelaire, Charles on taste    Share

"Nothing can be done except little by little."

Baudelaire, Charles on things and little things    Share

"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."

Baudelaire, Charles on time    Share

"The world only goes round by misunderstanding."

Baudelaire, Charles on understanding    Share

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