Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French poet, essayist, and critic. The British poet and essayist T. S. Eliot once said that Baudelaire was “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.” Such admiration is even more extraordinary considering Baudelaire’s whole works consist merely of a single volume of poetry, a book of prose poems, criticism, and three volumes of translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire had an unhappy life. He was born to a wealthy family in Paris. However, when his father died when he was six, he revolted under the stern discipline of his stepfather. He got expelled from military school and squandered much of his inheritance on clothes, sex, and drugs. When Baudelaire turned 21, his family, worried about his eccentric behavior and debts, got a court order to seize the remainder of his inheritance and disbursed it in small allowances for the rest of his life.

Baudelaire started writing essays, criticism, and translations to fund his indulgences. Baudelaire lived in the worst neighborhoods of Paris and switched apartments frequently to escape creditors. He struggled with poor health throughout his life and died at 46. The posthumous publication of much of his writing allowed his mother to settle his many debts.

At 36, Baudelaire published his only collection of lyric poetry, Les Fleurs de Mal (1857, The Flowers of Evil,) considered one of the most significant collections of French poetry. The book’s adulation of free love, drunkenness, world-weariness, and despair has influenced generations of bohemian artists. Baudelaire gained instant celebrity as a poète maudit (cursed poet) when six of the 101 poems in Les Fleurs de Mal were censored out for their moral and sexual themes, which were then considered obscene and scandalous.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Baudelaire

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Government

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
—Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
—Charles Baudelaire

Inspiration comes of working every day.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Work

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Madness

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soul, Gambling

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
Topics: Fantasy

Nature is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Nature

The poet is like the prince of clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poetry

Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Time Management

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
Topics: Love

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
Topics: War

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Business

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

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Beauty

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
Topics: Romance, Aspirations

Any healthy man can go without food for two days—but not without poetry.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poets, Art, Poetry

Hypocrite reader—my fellow—my brother!
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Books, Reading

The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Fear, Anxiety

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
Topics: The Present, Present

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Fashion

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Innovation, Originality

Nothing can be done except little by little.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: One Step at a Time, Things, Little Things

Genius is childhood recalled at will.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Genius

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Water

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists

Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Reason, Thought

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Critics, Art, Criticism

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