Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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Charles Baudelaire

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 9, 1821

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.

Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution.

Charles Baudelaire

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Charles Baudelaire

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Charles Baudelaire

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

Charles Baudelaire

Everything for me becomes allegory.

Charles Baudelaire

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Charles Baudelaire

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

Charles Baudelaire

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

Charles Baudelaire

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Charles Baudelaire

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

Charles Baudelaire

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Charles Baudelaire

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

Charles Baudelaire

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Charles Baudelaire