French poet (1821-1867)
A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Un mangeur d'opium"
The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusées
The sea conveys the thought both of immensity and of movement. Six or seven leagues are for man the radius of the infinite. 'Tis a diminutive infinite. What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate's immortal loom.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Paris Spleen"
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Mon Coeur Mis à Nu
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Be Drunken," Poems in Prose
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
My Heart Laid Bare
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World," Le Spleen de Paris
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fausse Monnaie," Le Spleen de Paris
Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Nothing can be done except little by little.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite," La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Le poème du haschisch," Les Paradis Artificiels
Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845, May 1845
When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du Mal
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Chant d'Automne," Flowers of Evil
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fanfarlo"