Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life.

The room was filled with deep, raucous sighs, sudden sobs, silent floods of tears. The horrified musician stopped,and going up to the man whose bliss was expressing itself most noisily, he asked him if he was in great pain and what would help to relieve it. But the sick man, his eyes gleaming ecstatically, looked at him with unspeakable contempt. Fancy wanting to save a man sick with too much life, sick with joy!

God is the only being who, in order to reign, need not even exist.

La Terre est un gâteau plein de douceur.

Minutes, foolish mortal, are the base mineral that you must not let go of without extracting their gold!

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

The night solidified into a wall, and my eyes had to guess where yours would be as I drank in your breath: nectar! venom! and your feet lay still in my harmless hands: the night solidified into a wall.

I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans; I hate movement for it displaces lines, And never do I weep and never do I laugh.

the Devil's hand directs our every move the things we loathed become the things we love; day by day we drop through stinking shades quite undeterred on our descent to Hell.

Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.

Only when we drink poison are we well.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

Today I felt pass over me / A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight —Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things!

Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you are happy only in your unhappiness? - Anywhere, Out of this World

One man illumines you with his other sets in you his sorrow.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.

Le Poète 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.

La mélancolie est l'illustre compagnon de la beauté ; elle l'est si bien que je ne peux concevoir aucune beauté qui ne porte en elle sa tristesse.

A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk.

By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.

Your eyes, brilliant as shop windows Or as blazing lamp-stands at public festivals, Insolently use a borrowed power Without ever knowing the law of their beauty.   Blind

Dans ce trou noir ou lumineux vit la vie, rêve la vie, souffre la vie.

Do you know that high fever which invades us in our cold suffering, that aching for a land we do not know, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country which resembles you, where everything is beautiful, sumptuous, authentic, still, where fantasy has built and adorned a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wed to silence. That is where to live, that is where to die! - Invitation to a Voyage