A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Wives, Marriage, One liners, Wine
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
Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity
Nothing can be done except little by little.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Little Things, Things, One Step at a Time
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
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
Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Cats
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Understanding
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
Topics: Art, Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Love
Inspiration comes of working every day.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Work
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Boredom, Bores, Work
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: Poetry, Art, Poets
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Originality, Innovation
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
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
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soldiers
Hypocrite reader—my fellow—my brother!
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Books, Reading
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
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Awareness
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
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Secrets of Success, Beginnings
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Happiness
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Immortality
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
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
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil
Nature is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Nature
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 is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
—Charles Baudelaire
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Arthur Rimbaud French Poet
- Remy de Gourmont French Poet, Writer
- Guillaume Apollinaire Italian-born French Poet
- Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
- Victor Hugo French Novelist
- Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
- Octave Mirbeau French Author
- Alphonse de Lamartine French Poet, Politician, Historian
- Jean de La Fontaine French Poet
- Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
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