100+ Charles Baudelaire Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

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.

Topics: Art, Mean, Color, Romanticism, Modern Art

quote the devil s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist charles baudelaire Quotes

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

Topics: Mysterious, Dance Performance

Nothing can be done except little by little.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1956). “The Essence of Laughter: And Other Essays, Journals, and Letters”

Topics: Perseverance, Done, Literature

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

Topics: Dance, Dancing, Mystery, Dancers Inspiration, Pointe

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

Topics: Order, Needs, Reign

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

Topics: Ingredients, Strangeness

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

Topics: Path

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Topics: Writing, Poetry, Literature

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

Topics: Happiness, Beauty, Way, Habitual, Seeking Happiness

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1986). “La Fanfarlo”

Topics: Suffering, Remember, Form

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1951). “My heart laid bare, and other prose writings”

Topics: Happiness, Delight, Multitudes

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

Topics: Beauty, Apathy, Satisfaction, Monstrous

Music fathoms the sky.

Topics: Sky, Fathom

The beautiful is always bizarre.

Topics: Beautiful, Art, Creativity, Baudelaire

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

Topics: Art, Evil, Effort

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

Topics: Lying, Immortality, Proof, Living Proof, Insatiable

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Topics: Childhood, Genius

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

Topics: Art, Passion, Art Is, Passion For Art

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

Topics: Vision, Looks, Window

Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

Topics: Wine, Drink, Virtue

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Topics: Memories, Men, Suffering

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.

Topics: Art, Elements, Half, Modernity, Fugitive

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.

Topics: Pain, Men, Long

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

Topics: Damnation, Delight, Matter

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

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1992). “Selected Writings on Art and Literature”, Penguin Classics

Topics: Beautiful, Math, Noble, Reasoning

Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end.

Topics: Dream, Attitude, Sleep

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.

Topics: Confused, Men, Forests, Woods And Forests

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

Topics: Moon, Cemetery

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 worldâ€”impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

Topics: Home, World, Tongue

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

Topics: Choices, Feelings, Way, Romanticism

As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work

Topics: Poverty, Sickness, Melancholy

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.

source: - Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (1970). “Paris Spleen, 1869”, p.78, New Directions Publishing

Topics: Inspire, Desire, Conquer

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.

Topics: Warrior, Three, May

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity â€“ that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.

Topics: Essentials, Astonishment, Unexpected, Irregularity

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

Topics: Nature, Self, Voice, Inner Voice

Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Topics: Thinking, Color, Clothes

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.

Topics: Love, Sex, World, Lovely Woman

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

Topics: Blue, Rivers, Yellow

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

Topics: Pleasure

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

Topics: Objectivity, Literature, Moral

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.

Topics: Heart, Agony, Depth

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Mean, Despair

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

Topics: Divine, Stills

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.

Topics: Art, Men, Order

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.

Topics: Life, Cities, Atmosphere, City Life, Cities At Night

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

Topics: Simple, Profound, Portraits

Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

Topics: Childhood, Genius

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.

Topics: Doe, Different, Elements, Different Beauty, Eternal Beauty

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?

Topics: Believe, Clouds, Worry, Exhaling

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Topics: Inspiration, Imagination

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.

Topics: Dance, Dancing, Legs, Inspirational Dance, Dance Performance

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.

Topics: Crush, Beer, Earth, Weighing

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Topics: Practice, Sorcery, Language, Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Topics: Understanding, World, Misunderstanding

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Topics: Dancing, Ballet, Legs

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.

Topics: Running, Dream, Strong, Dissipation

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.

Topics: Giving, Imagination, Pastures

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Topics: Party, Book, Reading, Counselor, Orchard

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.

Topics: Artist, Pleasure, Deformity

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (2001). “The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo”, p.74

Topics: Men, Giving, Surprise

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.

Topics: Fashion, Mind, Desire, Unsatisfied, Fashion Statement

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Topics: Boredom, Boring, Amusing

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

Topics: Running, Procrastination, Risk

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

Topics: Desire, Bed, Literature, Possessed, Hospitals

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Topics: Despair, Boring, Amusing

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.

Topics: Writing, Literature, Fifty, Creditors, Extraterrestrial

There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly.Â To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Topics: Practice, Sacred, Sorcery

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.

Topics: Believe, Men, Suffering, Desire To Change

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

Topics: Space, Profound, Moments

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Topics: Nice, Being Nice, Victim

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Topics: Best Love, Love Is, Crime, Accomplices

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Topics: Children, Heart, Two

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.

Topics: Men, Water, Secret

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.

Topics: Funny, Dog, People, Briefcases

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (2001). “The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo”, p.76

Topics: Life, Devil, Doe

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Topics: Childhood, Inspire, Genius

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

Topics: Firsts

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.

Topics: Lying, Civilization, Doe

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1951). “My heart laid bare, and other prose writings”

Topics: Ephemeral

Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.

Topics: Indispensable, Condiments

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.

Topics: Wine, Drunk, Matter, Wine Tasting, Drinking Too Much

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

Topics: Respect, Soldier, Three

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

Topics: Literature, Melancholy, Type

Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.

Topics: Mean, Giving, Reason

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (2013). “Flowers of Evil and Other Works: A Dual-Language Book”, p.263, Courier Corporation

Topics: Hysteria, Pleasure, Terror, Vertigo

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Topics: Prayer, Sleep, Men, Evening Prayer, Sentinels

Everything for me becomes allegory

Topics: Allegory

Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.

Topics: Men, Mirrors, He Man, Hashish

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!

Topics: Brother, Devil, Progress, Dear Brother

Certes, je sortirai quant a'Â Â moi satisfait D'un monde oÂ u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re"Â ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream.

Topics: Dream, World, Action

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.

Topics: Queens, Imagination

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

Topics: Art, Long, Art Is

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.

Topics: Photography, Art, Believe, Exactitude

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.

Topics: Philosophical, Imagination, Secret, Recourse

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

Topics: Heaven, Doe, Matter, Heaven Or Hell

Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.

Topics: Heart, Miserable

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

Topics: Men, Vulgar, Dandy

Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans deÂ go u" t. Lord! give me the strength and the courage To see my heart and my body without disgust.

Topics: Heart, Giving, Body

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

Topics: Time, Flower, Air

Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.

Topics: Voyages, Bitter, Tire, Knowledge Gained

La volupteÂ Â unique et supre"Â me de l'amour g|"t dans la certitude de faire le mal. The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.

Topics: Unique, Evil, Pleasure

Etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux. To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

Topics: Photography, Art, Real

A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.

Topics: Hate, Sleep, Two, Stingy

Il faut travailler sinon par go u" t, au moins par deÂ sespoir, puisque, tout bien veÂ rifieÂ , travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser. We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement.

Topics: Despair, Amusement, Boring

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

Topics: Evil, Joy, Making Love

Delacroix , Wagner , Baudelaire all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject man's nervous and psychic being.

Topics: Dream, Mean, Men

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

Topics: Queens, Imagination, Infinity

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Topics: Sun, Moments, Form, Metallic, Lunacy

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

Topics: War, Wings, Hysteria

I am the vampire at my own veins.

Topics: Vampire, Veins

Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.

Topics: Independent, Men, Ideas, Immortal Life

On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.

Topics: Proud, Pox, Firsts, Dose

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

Topics: Nature, Action, Mysterious

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

Topics: Happiness, Sacrifice, Humanity, Cannons

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues.

Topics: Running, Men, Ideas, Attire, Statues

My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present

Topics: Artist, Past, Interesting, Historical Value

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.

Topics: Art, Crime, Should

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.

Topics: God, Men, Two, Invocation, Descent

The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.

Topics: Sleep, Mirrors, Sublime, Dandy

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

Topics: Art, Cheer, Mind, Draught

The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness.

Topics: Stupidity, Lazy, Study, Vindictiveness

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

Topics: Drawing, Mind, Genuine, Draftsman

There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Topics: Art, Philosophy, Real

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.

Topics: Art, Devil, Doe, Convince Us

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

Topics: Self, Expression, Childhood, Self Expression

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Topics: Civilization, Tables, Sin

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!

Topics: Beautiful, Care, I Care

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.

Topics: Morning, Fall, Winter, Dreamy, Demented

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

Topics: Stars, Philosophical, Men, Enriching, Lively

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

Topics: Country, Men, Cities

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

Topics: Work, Simple, Years, Simple Truths, Sufferings In Life

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

Topics: Art, Thinking, People

What is it that brings on these moods of yours? Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.

Topics: Pain, Ordinary, Alive

The poet is like the prince of clouds Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer; Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.

Topics: Archer, Clouds, Wings

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.

Topics: Eye, Poetry, Joy, Imperfect Things

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Topics: Spring, Ambition, Cities, Junction, Supple

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

Topics: Progress, World, Misunderstanding

Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.

Topics: Strong, Cat, Pride, Sedentary

What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

Topics: Beautiful, Childhood, Theatre, Symmetrical, Beautiful Objects

We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

Topics: Women, Degrees, Proportion

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1919). “Baudelaire, His Prose and Poetry”

Topics: Love, Self, Needs

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

Topics: Love, Acts Of Love, Torture

There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.

Topics: Inspirational, Weakness, Succeed

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

Topics: Character, Portraits, Portraiture, Decor, Grimace

Evil comes up softly like a flower.

Topics: Flower, Evil, Come Up

As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results.

Topics: Artist, Technique, Methodology

I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!

Topics: Love, Clouds, Lovely

Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!

Topics: Morning, Flower, Men, Morning Sky, Luminous

It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.

Topics: Happiness, Humble, Pride

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

Topics: Epic, Philosopher, Poet

Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.

Topics: Love, Creating, Church

The People adore authority.

source: - Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.32, Courier Corporation

Topics: People, Authority, Adore

Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.

Topics: Art, Blessed, Suffering, Impurity

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Topics: Art, Men, Spirit, Cleavage

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

Topics: Beautiful, Ideas, Water

Everything, alas, is an abyss, Â— actions, desires, dreams, words!

Topics: Dream, Desire, Action

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

Topics: Passion, Determined

Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be"Â tes l'ont mangeÂ . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it.

Topics: Heart, Beast, My Heart

La'Â , tout n'est qu'ordre et beauteÂ , Luxe, calme et volupteÂ . There where all is order and beauty. Lush, calm and voluptuous.

Topics: Order, Calm, Voluptuous

J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans. IhavemorememoriesthanifIwereonethousandyearsold.

Topics: Souvenirs, Plus

Comme l'imagination a creÂ eÂ Â le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.

Topics: Imagination, World

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fataliteÂ ; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art. Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always a product of art.

Topics: Art, Destiny, Evil

Quand me"Â me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e"Â tre qui, pour reÂ gner, n'ait me"Â me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.

Topics: Needs, Divine, Stills

The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.

Topics: Dream, Soul, Ambitious

The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

Topics: Work, Want, Produce

Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.

Topics: Wind, Insanity, Mind

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

Topics: Spiritual, Art, Mean, Discovering The Truth

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

Topics: Lying, Men, Vices

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

Topics: Government, Veins, Syphilis

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

Topics: Infinity, Infinite, Barbs

A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.

Topics: Women, Clothes, Hair, Androgyny

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.

Topics: Summer, Spring, Autumn, Shutters, Winter Snow

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

Topics: Butterfly, Bird, Together, Ambrosia

Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.

Topics: Dream, Work, Poor

An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.

Topics: Inspiring, Art, Dual Nature, Dualism

Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique OÂ u' ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers. I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach.

Topics: Pain, Unique, Hell

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

Topics: Oasis, Boredom, Desert

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

Topics: Church, Wanted

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

Topics: Believe, Passion, Thinking, Dandy, Aristocratic

and over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year;

Topics: Fate, Years, Lament

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

Topics: Drunk, Earth, Break

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.

Topics: Morning, Drinking, Flower, Morning Sky, Outreach

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

Topics: Forever, Too Much, Impossible, Conceiving

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

Topics: Mold, Allegory

From his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily.

Topics: Sweet, Cat, Eye, Opal

Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

Topics: Girl, Pearls, Nudity

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 mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

Topics: Thoughtful, Men, Joy, Mollusks, Strollers

Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.

Topics: Dance, Believe, Ballet

But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!

Topics: Heart, Knowing, Light, Fatality

...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.

Topics: Flames, Blood, Skins

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

source: - Charles Baudelaire (1955). “The Flowers of Evil”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

Topics: Men, Baudelaire, Great Men, Like Family

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

Topics: Dream, Reality, Fleeting, Earthly Things, True Reality

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!

Topics: Knives, Poison, Arson

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Topics: Latin, Dark, Dust, Bookcases, Babel

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Topics: Mean, Men, Order

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.

Topics: Archer, Clouds, Wings, Stormy Days

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.

Topics: Beauty, Time, Aquariums

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