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

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

Charles Baudelaire

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Charles Baudelaire

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What on...

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells, Where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, Not for vain tears I went up at ...

Charles Baudelaire

If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!

Charles Baudelaire

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do...

Charles Baudelaire

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollus...

Charles Baudelaire

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

Charles Baudelaire

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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 a...

Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

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