Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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Charles Baudelaire

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 9, 1821

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Charles Baudelaire

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Charles Baudelaire

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

Charles Baudelaire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

Charles Baudelaire

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

Charles Baudelaire

The 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.

Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky.

Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Charles Baudelaire

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Charles Baudelaire

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Charles Baudelaire

We are all born marked for evil.

Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Charles Baudelaire

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

Charles Baudelaire

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

Charles Baudelaire

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Charles Baudelaire

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Charles Baudelaire