CHARLES BAUDELAIRE QUOTES III

French poet (1821-1867)

There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
There man passes through the forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar looks.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Correspondences


Evil comes up softly like a flower.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Epilogue"


The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

attributed, Four French Symbolist Poets


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

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


The misery of the cuckold. It springs from his pride, from a false conception of honor and of happiness, and from a love foolishly turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It is ever the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"The Seven Old Men," Flowers of Evil


Sudden as a knife you thrust
into my sorry heart
and strong as a host of demons came,
gaudy and libertine,
to make in my corrupted mind
your bed and bedlam there;
Beast, who bind me to you close
as convict to his chains.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"The Vampire"


Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française", Salon de 1859


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.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

preface, Salon of 1846


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.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Un mangeur d'opium"


It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate's immortal loom.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Paris Spleen"


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

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty -- a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," L'art romantique


The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare


Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Le poème du haschisch," Les Paradis Artificiels


What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Fusées


In the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"The Favours of the Moon"


Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

My Heart Laid Bare