Charles Baudelaire Quotations | Page 3

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.

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

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

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.

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!

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

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.

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.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

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.

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.

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

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

Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

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

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

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.

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

Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

A Dandy does nothing.

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.

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

When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Il faut travailler sinon par go u" t, au moins par de sespoir, puisque, tout bien ve rifie , 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.

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.

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

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.

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

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

Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is the Dandy?

...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.

Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God? The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil.

I am the vampire at my own veins.

In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

I lived for a long time under vast porticos That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires, And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous In the evening made seem like basaltic caves.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.

I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

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

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

To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my primitive passion).

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

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.

That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.

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

It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.

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

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.

Strangeness is an ingredient necessary in beauty.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

La volupte unique et supre" 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.

There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.

Perfumes, colours and sounds echo one another.

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

From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren, What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, light, o my only queen - The universe less hideous, each moment less strained?

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

A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.

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.

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.

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

Wine transforms moles into eagles.

A silent mouth is sweet to hear.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

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

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

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

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

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

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.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

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.