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Charles Baudelaire [1821-1867] French

Rank: 101
Poet (with poems)

Romanticism, Free verse, Impressionism, Dark romanticism, Sonnet, Bipolar disorder, Parnassianism, Symbolism, Modernism, Libertine, Decadents, National

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Beauty, Poetry, Art, Nature, Brainy, Business, Change, Communication, Dreams, Food, Happiness, Men, Music, Religion, Respect, Sad, Space, Time, Women, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Poetry, Time	101
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.	Nature	102
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.	Food, Poetry	103
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.	Brainy	104
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.		105
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.		106
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.		107
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.	Communication	108
Inspiration comes of working every day.	Work	109
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.		110
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.	Art	111
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.	Art	112
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.	Nature	113
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.		114
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!	Beauty	115
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.		116
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.	Beauty	117
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.	Nature	118
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.	Poetry	119
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.	Music, Poetry	120
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.	Art	121
Always be a poet, even in prose.	Poetry	122
Nothing can be done except little by little.		123
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.		124
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.	Beauty	125
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.	Respect	126
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.	Change	201
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.	Dreams	202
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.		203
Progress, this great heresy of decay.		204
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!		205
There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.		206
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.	Women	207
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.	Beauty	208
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.	Beauty	209
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.		210
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.		211
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.	Beauty, Happiness	212
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.	Space	213
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.		214
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.		215
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.		216
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.	Beauty	217
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.	Beauty	218
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.		219
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.		220
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.		221
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.	Religion	222
We are all born marked for evil.		223
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.		224
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.	Business	225
Music fathoms the sky.		226
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.		301
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.		302
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.		303
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.		304
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.		305
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.		306
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.	Sad	307
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.		308
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.		309
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.		310
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.		311
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.		312
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.		313
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.		314
Genius is childhood recalled at will.		315
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.		316
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.	Men	317
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.		318
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.		319
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.		320
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.		321
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.		322
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.		323
What is art? Prostitution.		324
Everything for me becomes allegory.		325
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.		326
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.		401
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.		402
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.		403
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?		404
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.		405
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.		406
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.		407
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.		408
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.		409
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.		410

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