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

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.

Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Charles Baudelaire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire

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

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

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

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

Charles Baudelaire

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

Charles Baudelaire

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

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