Charles Baudelaire Quotes
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.
How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.
Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.
Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.
I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.
How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
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.
It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!
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.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.
Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.
Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
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.
What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.