Charles Baudelaire Quotes

French poet and critic1821–1867 11 quotes

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are noted for their mastery of rhythm and rhyme, an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and their grounding in observations of real life.

His most famous work, the lyric collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in a Paris being rapidly industrialised by Haussmann's renovation in the mid-19th century. His original prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity to describe the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and Marshall Berman credited him as the first Modernist. Les Fleurs du Mal and Paris Spleen are his most quoted works in our library.
Most quoted works
  • Les Fleurs Du Mal 6
  • Paris Spleen 4
  • Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book (Dover Foreign Language Study Guides) 3
  • Intimate Journals 3
  • The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays 3
French poet and critic

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

— Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition

French poet and critic

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.

— Twenty Prose Poems

French poet and critic

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

— Selected Writings on Art and Literature

French poet and critic

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.

— Intimate Journals

French poet and critic

Nature can counsel nothing but crime.

— The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

French poet and critic

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.

— The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

French poet and critic

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.

— Les Fleurs Du Mal

French poet and critic

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins, that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

— Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book (Dover Foreign Language Study Guides)

French poet and critic

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

— Paris Spleen

French poet and critic

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.

— La Fanfarlo

French poet and critic

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

— Les Fleurs Du Mal