French poet (1821-1867)
Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
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. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Be Drunken," Poems in Prose
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
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"
He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Crowds"
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
New Notes on E. Poe
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fanfarlo"
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"
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
"Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845, May 1845
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World," Le Spleen de Paris
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Chant d'Automne," Flowers of Evil
Nothing can be done except little by little.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fausse Monnaie," Le Spleen de Paris
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite," La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du Mal