Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

About Charles Baudelaire:

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink! The land rots; we shall sail into the night; if now the sky and sea are black as ink our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light. Only when we drink poison are we well — we want, this fire so burns...

Charles Baudelaire

the Devil's hand directs our every move the things we loathed become the things we love; day by day we drop through stinking shades quite undeterred on our descent to Hell.

Charles Baudelaire

Thanks be to God, Who gives us suffering as sacred remedy for all our sins, that best and purest essence which prepares the strong in spirit for divine delights!

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grote...

Charles Baudelaire

On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.

Charles Baudelaire

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.

Charles Baudelaire

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Charles Baudelaire

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short and Art is long.

Charles Baudelaire

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

Charles Baudelaire

Author Bio

  • NameCharles Baudelaire
  • DescriptionFrench poet
  • AliasesBaudelaire; Charles Pierre Baudelaire
  • BornApril 9, 1821
  • DiedAugust 31, 1867
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPoet; Art Critic; Linguist; Essayist; Translator; Writer