Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Charles Baudelaire Poet

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: France
  • Born: Apr 9, 1821
  • Died: Aug 31, 1867

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal, expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

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

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

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

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

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

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

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

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

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

What is art? Prostitution.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

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

Music fathoms the sky.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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

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

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

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

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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