Top 371 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Baudelaire - Page 5

When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!

It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.

...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.

Certes, je sortirai quant a' moi satisfait D'un monde o u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re" ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream.

It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God? The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil.

Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.

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.

In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

Strangeness is an ingredient necessary in beauty.

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.

To be a great man and a saint to oneself, that's the only important thing.

From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen - The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

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.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.

There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

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.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there Up there the wonderful clouds!

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Everything, alas, is an abyss, ? actions, desires, dreams, words!

the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

The idea which man forms of beauty imprints itself throughout his attire, rumples or stiffens his garments, rounds off or aligns his gestures, and, finally, even subtly penetrates the features of his face.

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.