Top 371 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Baudelaire
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French poet Charles Baudelaire.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
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.
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.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
Inspiration comes of working every day.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
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.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
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.
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.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
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.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
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.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
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.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
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.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
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.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
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.
Music fathoms the sky.
We are all born marked for evil.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
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.
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
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.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
What is art? Prostitution.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
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