French poet (1821-1867)
Come back, I beg you, and I shall be gentle and modest in my desires.... I won't say you'll find me no longer in love, but you cannot prevent my mind wandering around your arms, those beautiful hands of yours, your eyes which are the mainspring of life, and all your adorable earthly being. No, I know you cannot prevent it: but fear not, you are for me an object of worship, and I am incapable of defiling you.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
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letter to Mme. Marie, 1852
The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fanfarlo"
In the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Favours of the Moon"
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate's immortal loom.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Paris Spleen"
Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
There man passes through the forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar looks.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Correspondences
Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Chant d'Automne," Flowers of Evil
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Un mangeur d'opium"
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
New Notes on E. Poe
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Fausse Monnaie," Le Spleen de Paris
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Les Fleurs du Mal
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Anywhere Out of the World," Le Spleen de Paris
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
attributed, Four French Symbolist Poets
He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Crowds"
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite," La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare