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 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

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

Anybody at all has the right to talk about himself-provided he knows how to be entertaining.
—Charles Baudelaire

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

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soldiers

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

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

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Understanding

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
Topics: Virtues, Virtue

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Insults

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

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

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

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

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Genius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Bores, Work, Boredom

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

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

Every man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Acceptance

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

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

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Awareness

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Dancing, Dance

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

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