Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.

~ Charles Baudelaire

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

~ Charles Baudelaire

My heart is lost, the beasts have eaten it.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

~ Charles Baudelaire

And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.

~ Charles Baudelaire

the Devil's hand directs our every movethe things we loathed become the things we love,day by day we drop through stinking shadesquite undeterred on our descent to Hell.

~ Charles Baudelaire

To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another, the artist never emerges from himself.

~ Charles Baudelaire

I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.

~ 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

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

~ Charles Baudelaire

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

~ Charles Baudelaire

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

~ Charles Baudelaire

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

~ Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.

~ Charles Baudelaire

In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.

~ Charles Baudelaire

There is no such thing as a long piece of work except one that you dare not start.

~ Charles Baudelaire

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

~ Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

~ Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

~ 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

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

~ Charles Baudelaire

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

~ Charles Baudelaire

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.

~ Charles Baudelaire