Charles Baudelaire

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Charles Baudelaire

Biography : French poet.
Born: 1821 - Died: 1867
Period:
19th century
Place of birth: France
France

France

Charles Baudelaire - Quotes

There are moments in life when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence immeasurably increased.
Charles Baudelaire /

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
Charles Baudelaire /

pleasure

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire /

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
Charles Baudelaire /

beauty

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

Music fathoms the sky.
Charles Baudelaire /

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire /

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.
Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal /

The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and color.
Charles Baudelaire /

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Charles Baudelaire

beauty

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.
Charles Baudelaire

music

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.
Charles Baudelaire

time

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
Charles Baudelaire

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
Charles Baudelaire

art

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.
Charles Baudelaire

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.
Charles Baudelaire

life

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.
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

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.
Charles Baudelaire

art

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
Charles Baudelaire

beauty

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

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.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Charles Baudelaire /

art

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.
Charles Baudelaire

art

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.
Charles Baudelaire

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
Charles Baudelaire

art