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 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
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
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
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Business
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: Writing, Art, Authors & Writing, Writers
Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity
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
Topics: Consumerism
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: Poetry, Poets
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
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
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
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Art, Criticism, Critics
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: Virtue, Vice
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
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sex
Inspiration comes of working every day.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Work
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Prayer
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Government
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Dancing, Dance
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
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
In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Procrastination, Getting Going, Inaction
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: Poets, Poetry, Art
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
Nothing can be done except little by little.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Things, Little Things, One Step at a Time
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
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
Topics: City Life, Cities
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
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