Quotes from Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink! The land rots; we shall sail into the night; if now the sky and sea are black as ink our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light. Only when we drink poison are we well — we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue, to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell, who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. (Le Voyage)

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du NOUVEAU! (rough translation : Into the abyss -- Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make? / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!)

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

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

I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.

L'orage rajeunit les fleurs

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

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

de satan ou de dieu, qu'importe! ange ou sirène, qu'importe, si tu rends -- fée aux yeux de velours, rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! -- l'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

No renuncies jamás a tus sueños, los cuerdos nada saben del sueño admirable de un loco!»

Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

The child, in love with prints and maps, Holds the whole world in his vast appetite. How large the earth is under the lamplight! But in the eyes of memory, how the world is cramped!

Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.

In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!