French poet (1821-1867)
Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Le poème du haschisch," Les Paradis Artificiels
Come back, I beg you, and I shall be gentle and modest in my desires.... I won't say you'll find me no longer in love, but you cannot prevent my mind wandering around your arms, those beautiful hands of yours, your eyes which are the mainspring of life, and all your adorable earthly being. No, I know you cannot prevent it: but fear not, you are for me an object of worship, and I am incapable of defiling you.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
letter to Mme. Marie, 1852
An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty -- a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," L'art romantique
The sea conveys the thought both of immensity and of movement. Six or seven leagues are for man the radius of the infinite. 'Tis a diminutive infinite. What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
In the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Favours of the Moon"
Nothing can be done except little by little.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World," Le Spleen de Paris
He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Crowds"
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Be Drunken," Poems in Prose
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite," La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fausse Monnaie," Le Spleen de Paris
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Chant d'Automne," Flowers of Evil
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845, May 1845
When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du Mal
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fanfarlo"