Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas. It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Music fathoms the sky.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short and Art is long.

Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuve La pleine lune s'étalait, Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve Sur Paris dormant ruisselait.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

Dieu est le seul être qui, pour règner, n'a même pas besoin d'exister.

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.

I know that pain is the one nobility / upon which Hell itself cannot encroach

He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.