Charles Baudelaire Quotes

The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases.

Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.

Remembering is only a new form of suffering.

All great poets become naturally, fatally, critics.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not - to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire: Get Drunk
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: 'It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!'
— Charles Baudelaire, tr. Michael Hamburger

Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion.

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

Pour le commerçant, l’honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre.

There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd. … There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.

It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.