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
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soldiers
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
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Time Management, Time
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
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil
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
Topics: Art, Poets, Poetry
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
Topics: Women
Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Prayer
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
Nothing can be done except little by little.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Little Things, Things, One Step at a Time
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Innovation, Originality
Any healthy man can go without food for two days—but not without poetry.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Art
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
—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
If a certain assemblage of trees, of mountains, of waters, and of houses that we call a landscape is beautiful, it is not because of itself, but through me, through my own indulgence, through the thought or the sentiment that I attach to it
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Wilderness
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Thought
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sin
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Thought, Reason
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Photography
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: One liners, Wives, Wine, Marriage
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: Gambling, Soul
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Dancing, Dance
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
—Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Genius
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
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Beauty
As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Health
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Taste, Style
Nature is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Nature
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Understanding
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
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Tourism, Travel
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced—of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Success
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man’s longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Vice, Virtue
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Understanding
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Time Management
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Government
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