Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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.

La danse peut révéler tout ce que la musique recèle de mystérieux, et elle a de plus le mérite d'être humaine et palpable. La danse, c'est la poésie avec des bras et des jambs, ...

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Dieu est le seul être qui, pour règner, n'a même pas besoin d'exister.

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.

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

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.

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.

- A Carcass

Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance!

Music fathoms the sky.

Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

As if, with beasts' eyes, angels led
The way, I slip back to your bed,
Quiet as a hooded light,
Hushed by the shadows of the night.

And then, my dark one, you shall soon
Embrace the cold beams of the moon,
Around a fresh grave, the chilling hiss
Of serpent coiled shall be my kiss.

When morning shows his livid face
Your bed shall feel my empty place,
As cold as death, till fall of night.

Others take tenderness to wife:
Dread gives away your youth and life
To me, to be the bride of fright.

Il n’y a de gouvernement raisonnable et assuré que l’aristocratique. Monarchie ou république, basées sur la démocratie, sont également absurdes et faibles. Immense nausée des affiches.

Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune.