Charles Baudelaire Quotes (1821-1867)

“Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”

“Loin des sépultures célebres Vers un cimitière isolé Mon cœur, comme un tambour voilé Va battant des marches funèbres. To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.”

“There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”

“He complained in no way of the evil reputation under which he lived, indeed, all over the world, and he assured me that he himself was of all living beings the most interested in the destruction of Superstition, and he avowed to me that he had been afraid, relatively as to his proper power, once only, and that was on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than the rest of the human herd, cry in his pulpit: "My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when you hear the progress of lights praised, that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!"”

“Hugo, like a priest, always has his head bowed -- bowed so low that he can see nothing except his own navel.”

“La très chère était nue, et, connaissant mon coeur, Elle n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores, Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l’air vainqueur Qu’ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Mores.”

“I grew bored in France -- and the main reason is that everyone here resembles Voltaire. When Emerson wrote his Representatives of Humanity, he forgot Voltaire. He could have written an attractive chapter entitled: 'Voltaire, or the anti-poet' -- the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesmen of janitresses, the Father Gigogne of the editors of Siècle. In his Lord Chesterfield's Ears, Voltaire pokes fun at that immortal soul who for nine months dwelt amidst excrement and urine. Like all idlers, Voltaire hated mystery. He might at least have detected, in this choice of dwelling-place, a grudge or satire directed by Providence against love -- and thus, in the method of procreation, a sign of Original Sin. After all we can make love only with the organs of excrement.”

“Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.”

“The imagination eulogized by Baudelaire is in his own case more often than not a synonym for desire or despair. His critical exigencies are, like those of the profoundly sick man that he was, harsh and imperative and illusory in the sense of release temporarily obtained. Yet imagination is also the faculty that gives Baudelaire a royal sense of equality with other creative artists; he uses his status as a poet to boost his activities as a critic, claiming, with total justification in his case, that criticism is a creative affair, a fine rather than applied art.”

“Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.”