Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

41 quotes

Charles Baudelaire is a French poet and critic whose words have traveled far beyond their original audience. The range of their thinking — from Art to Beauty — speaks to an intellectual restlessness that shows in every quote. With 53 quotes in our library, Charles Baudelaire is among the most well-represented voices here, with thoughts on Art, Beauty, Poetry, Nature, and Women. Perhaps their most recognizable line: "Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art."

“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

All Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Food

“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Best

“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Dreams

“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

Beauty

“The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Men

“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

Nature

“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

Poetry

“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Music

“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Nature

“The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Family

“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

Love

“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty

“It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Poetry

“Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Religion

“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Respect

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Poetry

“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty