French poet (1821-1867)
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," L'art romantique
The sea conveys the thought both of immensity and of movement. Six or seven leagues are for man the radius of the infinite. 'Tis a diminutive infinite. What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusées
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
New Notes on E. Poe
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon coeur mis à nu
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
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. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Be Drunken," Poems in Prose
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Crowds"
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World," Le Spleen de Paris
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
Nothing can be done except little by little.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fausse Monnaie," Le Spleen de Paris
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite," La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Chant d'Automne," Flowers of Evil
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845, May 1845
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fanfarlo"
When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du Mal