Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Charles Baudelaire was a famous French poet, art critic and philosopher. He is best known for his poetry that took from romanticism and looked at real life. Famous Charles Baudelaire poems and publications include “The Flowers of Evil”, “Artificial Paradises”, “Paris Spleen”, “Baudelaire as a Literary Critic”, “Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, and “Salon de 1846”.

Mini biography: Born Charles Pierre Baudelaire on the 9th of April, 1821 in Paris, France. His mother was Caroline Dufaÿs and his father Joseph-François Baudelaire was a civil servant. Baudelaire never married but had a twenty year relationship with the Haitian born Jeanne Duval. The poet died on the 31st of August, 1867 in Paris, France at the age of 46. Charles Baudelaire is buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, Île-de-France, France.

List of Famous Charles Baudelaire Quotes

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

Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable. Charles Baudelaire

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

What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough? Charles Baudelaire

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself. Charles Baudelaire

An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion. Charles Baudelaire

Genius is nothing but youth recaptured at will. Charles Baudelaire

All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular. Charles Baudelaire

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one’s eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth. Charles Baudelaire

But what can eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight? Charles Baudelaire

The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. Charles Baudelaire

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses. Charles Baudelaire

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way. Charles Baudelaire

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for. Charles Baudelaire

Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of reverie, the jolts of consciousness? Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire Portrait – Painting

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Related or similar popular poets include: Edouard Manet, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, and other Famous French Poets.