Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête,
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum,
Nagent autour de son corps brun.

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

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

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

de satan ou de dieu, qu'importe! ange ou sirène,
qu'importe, si tu rends — fée aux yeux de velours,
rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! — l'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?

In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,

Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;

But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.

Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,
Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,

I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand.

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again — lazy people.

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.

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.

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance