Charles Baudelaire Quotes

He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui.

Un soir, l'âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles:
"Homme, vers toi je pousse, ô cher déshérité,
Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles."

Our mortal eyes, however bright, are only darkened melancholy mirrors.

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.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

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

Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing.

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions.

I am the vampire at my own veins.

Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,
Parole!

L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,
Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.