Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

I worship you like night's pavilion, O vase of sadness, o great silent one, And love you more since you escape from me, And since you seem, my night's sublimity, To mock me and increase the leagues that lie Between my arms and blue immensity. I move to the attack, besiege, assail, Like eager worms after a funeral. I even love, o beast implacable, The coldness which makes you more beautiful.

Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

Romanticism is a grace, celestial or infernal, that bestows us eternal stigmata.

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.

C'est l'Ennui! —l'Å"il chargé d'un pleur involontaire, Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka. Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, —Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!

When I was young I lived a constant storm, Though now and then the brilliant suns shot through, So in my garden few red fruits were born, The rain and thunder had so much to do. - The Enemy

Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it

I am the vampire at my own veins.

Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

Folly, error, sin, avarice Occupy our minds and labor our bodies, And we feed our pleasant remorse As beggars nourish their vermin.

Le beau est toujours bizarre

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.

But how you'd please me, night! without those stars Whose light speaks in a language I have known! Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare!

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!

Regarding sleep, this sinister adventure of each night, one could say that people fall asleep daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we didn't know that it results from their being oblivious of danger.

Lost in this awful world, rubbing shoulders with the multitudes, I am like a tired man whose eye can't see behind him, in the deep years, anything but disillusion and bitterness, and in front of him, nothing but a storm which contains nothing new, neither learning nor pain.

Listen, my dear-- with soft step the night hears.

So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté. (L'Invitation au Voyage)

Late night, and like a medal in the sky The harvest moon was beaming down, And, like a river, the solemnity Of night arranged on the sleeping town. - Confession

L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche, Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.