1821-1867, French Poet
Inspiration comes of working every day.
Charles Baudelaire – [Work]
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
Charles Baudelaire – [Critics and Criticism]
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
Charles Baudelaire – [Love]
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire – [Modern and Modernism]
Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Charles Baudelaire – [Nature]
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
Charles Baudelaire – [Originality]
Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire – [Things and Little Things]
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
Charles Baudelaire – [Writers and Writing]
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 – [Catholicism]
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
Charles Baudelaire – [Poetry and Poets]
The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings — woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general… only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.
Charles Baudelaire – [Women]
The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions… one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice… it's Humanity in search of happiness.
Charles Baudelaire – [War]
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.
Charles Baudelaire – [Cities and City Life]
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
Charles Baudelaire – [Lovers]
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire – [Prayer]
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Charles Baudelaire – [Arts and Artists]
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Charles Baudelaire – [Present]
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.
Charles Baudelaire – [Materialism]
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.
Charles Baudelaire – [Symbols]
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Charles Baudelaire – [Understanding]
| Quotations 21 to 40 of 51 | First | < Previous | Next > | Last |