Charles Baudelaire quotes
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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 -
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Nothing can be done except little by little.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
We revel in the laxness of the path we take.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Remembering is only a new form of suffering.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A multitude of small delights constitute 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 -
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Music fathoms the sky.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The beautiful is always bizarre.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
-- 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 -
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 -
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What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.
-- 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 -
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I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
-- 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 -
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Inspiration comes of working every day.
-- 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 -
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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.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-- 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 -
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There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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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 -
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Everything for me becomes allegory
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist!
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Certes, je sortirai quant a'  moi satisfait D'un monde o u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re" ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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 -
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans de go u" t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
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