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."

“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

All Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Food

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty

“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

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Best

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Respect

“Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Religion

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty

“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Work

“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

“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

“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Finance

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

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Poetry

“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Art

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Poetry

“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

“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 would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Beauty

“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”

— Charles Baudelaire

Nature