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Charles Baudelaire

French poet and critic (1821–1867)

Charles Baudelaire (9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, critic and translator.

You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.

Quotes

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Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
 
Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses.
 
I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine.
  • Tout ce qui plaît a une raison de plaire, et mépriser les attroupements de ceux qui s'égarent n'est pas le moyen de les ramener où ils devraient être.
    • Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
      • "Quelques mots d'introduction," Salon de 1845 (May 1845) [1]
  • Toutes les beautés contiennent, comme tous les phénomènes possibles, quelque chose d'éternel et quelque chose de transitoire — d'absolu et de particulier.
    • All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.
      • "De l'héroïsme de la vie moderne," Salon de 1846, XVIII (1846) [2]
  • Nous avons psychologisé comme les fous, qui augmentent leur folie en s’efforçant de la comprendre.
    • We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
      • "La Fanfarlo" (1847) [3]
  • La danse peut révéler tout ce que la musique recèle de mystérieux, et elle a de plus le mérite d'être humaine et palpable. La danse, c'est la poésie avec des bras et des jambs, ...
    • Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
      • "La Fanfarlo" (1847) [4]
  • Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or.
    • You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.
      • "Ébauche d’un épilogue pour la 2e édition," Les Fleurs du Mal (1861), Appendice II: Autres pièces [5]
  • Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,
    Parole!
    • Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams,
      Words!
      • "Le Gouffre" [The Abyss], Nouvelles Fleurs du Mal (1862) [6]
  • Delacroix était passionnément amoureux de la passion, et froidement déterminé à chercher les moyens d'exprimer la passion de la manière la plus visible. Dans ce double caractère, nous trouvons, disons-le en passant, les deux signes qui marquent les plus solides génies, génies extrêmes.
    • Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses.
  • Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté.
    • Genius is nothing but youth recaptured at will.
      • Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”

Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

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Drawing of Jeanne Duval by Baudelaire
  • Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
    • Hypocrite reader — my likeness — my brother!
      • "Au Lecteur" [To the Reader] [7]
  • Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
    N'ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
    Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
    C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie    .
  • If rape, poison, daggers, arson
    Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
    The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
    It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
  • "Au Lecteur" [To the Reader]
  • 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.
    • The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
      Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
      But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
      He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
      • "L’Albatros" [The Albatross] (translated by James McGowan, Oxford University Press, 1993) [8]
  • La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
    Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
    L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
    Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
    • Nature is a temple where living columns
      Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
      Man finds his way through forests of symbols
      Which regard him with familiar gazes.
      • "Correspondances" [Correspondences] [9]
  • I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine.
    • Letter to his mother, Correspondences, Vol. 2, p. 253
  • Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie.
    • Oh pain! Oh pain! Time eats life.
      • "L’Ennemi" [The Enemy] [10]
    • Variant translations:
      • Oh pain! Oh pain! Time eats our lives.
      • Oh pain! Oh pain! Time is eating away my life.
  • Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer.
    • Free man, you will always cherish the sea.
      • "L'Homme et la Mer" [Man and the Sea] [11]

  • Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
    Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,
    Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour
    Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

    Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris;
    J’unis un cœur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;
    Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
    Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

    • I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone;
      And my breast, where everyone is bruised in his turn,
      Has been made to awaken in poets a love
      That is eternal and as silent as matter.

      I am throned in blue sky like a sphinx unbeknown;
      My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans;
      I detest any movement displacing still lines,
      And never do I weep and never laugh.

      • "La Beauté" [Beauty] [12]
  • Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
    Luxe, calme et volupté.
    • There, all is order and beauty only,
      Splendor, peace, and pleasure.
      • "L'Invitation au Voyage" [Invitation to the Voyage] [13]
  • Ne cherchez plus mon cœur; des monstres l’ont mangé.
    • Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.
      • "Causerie" [Conversation] [14]
 
We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.
  • Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
    Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!
    • Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
      Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
      • "Chant d'Automne" [Song of Autumn] [15]
  • Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune.
    • I am a cemetery loathed by the moon.
  • Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
    Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
    • Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
      Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!
      • "Les Sept Vieillards" [The Seven Old Men] [17]
  • C'était l'heure où l'essaim des rêves malfaisants
    Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents.
    • It is the hour when the swarm of malevolent dreams
      Makes sun-browned adolescents writhe upon their pillows.
      • "Le Crépuscule du Matin" [Morning Twilight] [18]
  • Un soir, l'âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles:
    "Homme, vers toi je pousse, ô cher déshérité,
    Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles."
    • One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
      "O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
      This song full of light and of brotherhood
      From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals."
      • "L'Âme du Vin" [The Soul of Wine] [19]
  • "En toi je tomberai, végétale ambroisie,
    Grain précieux jeté par l'éternel Semeur,
    Pour que de notre amour naisse la poésie
    Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur!"
    • "Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
      By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
      So that from our love there will be born poetry,
      Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"
      • "L'Âme du Vin" [The Soul of Wine]
 
José de Charmoy, Cenotaph of Baudelaire (detail), Cimetière de Montparnasse, Paris

  • Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges,
    Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,

    Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

    Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort
    Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,

    Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

    Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines,
    Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines,

    Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

    Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits,
    Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis,

    Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

    • O wise among all Angels ordinate,
      God foiled of glory, god betrayed by fate,
      Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
      O Prince of Exile doomed to heinous wrong,
      Who, vanquished, riseth ever stark and strong,
      Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
      Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
      Familiar healer of man's sufferings,
      Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
      Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all:
      Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal,
      Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
      • "Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan] [20]
 
This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
  • Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs
    Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs
    de l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!
    Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l’Arbre de Science,
    Près de toi se repose, à l’heure où sur ton front
    Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s’épandront!
    • Satan be praised! Glory to you on High
      where once you reigned in Heaven, and in the
      Pit where now you dream in taciturn defeat!
      Grant that my soul, one day, beneath the Tree
      of Knowledge, meet you when above your brow
      its branches, like a second Temple, spread!
      • "Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan]
  • Quelle est cette île triste et noire? — C'est Cythère,
    Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
    Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
    Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.
    • What is that sad, black island like a pall?
      Why, Cytherea, famed in many a book,
      The Eldorado of old-stagers. Look:
      It's but a damned poor country after all!
  • Although we have a heart for the work,
    Art is long and time is short.
  • "Le Guignon" (quoting Hippocrates)

Salon de 1859 (1859)

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There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfuly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
  • C'est l'imagination qui a enseigné à l'homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum. Elle a créé, au commencement du monde, l'analogie et la métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l'origine que dans le plus profond de l'âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. Comme elle a créé le monde (on peut bien dire cela, je crois, même dans un sens religieux), il est juste qu'elle le gouverne.
    • It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.
      • "Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés [22]

  • L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Elle est positivement apparentée avec l'infini.

    Sans elle, toutes les facultés, si solides ou si aiguisées qu'elles soient, sont comme si elles n'étaient pas, tandis que la faiblesse de quelques facultés secondaires, excitées par une imagination vigoureuse, est un malheur secondaire. Aucune ne peut se passer d'elle, et elle peut suppléer quelques-unes. Souvent ce que celles-ci cherchent et ne trouvent qu'après les essais successifs de plusieurs méthodes non adaptées à la nature des choses, fièrement et simplement elle le devine. Enfin elle joue un rôle puissant même dans la morale; car, permettez-moi d'aller jusque-là, qu'est-ce que la vertu sans imagination?

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

      Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?

      • "Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés
  • In times of old when Nature in her glad excess
    Brought forth such living marvels as no more are seen,
    I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess,
    Like a voluptuous cat about the feet of a queen.
    • La Geante (1859)

Les paradis artificiels (1860)

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An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
  • Hélas! les vices de l’homme, si pleins d’horreur qu’on les suppose, contiennent la preuve (quand ce ne serait que leur infinie expansion!) de son goût de l’infini.
    • Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.
      • "Le poème du haschisch," I: Le goût de l'infini [23]

  • L’homme qui, dès le commencement, a été longtemps baigné dans la molle atmosphère de la femme, dans l’odeur de ses mains, de son sein, de ses genoux, de sa chevelure, de ses vêtements souples et flottants,

    Dulce balneum suavibus
    Unguentatum odoribus,

    y a contracté une délicatesse d’épiderme et une distinction d’accent, une espèce d’androgynéité, sans lesquelles le génie le plus âpre et le plus viril reste, relativement à la perfection dans l’art, un être incomplet.

    • 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,

      Sweet bath, suavely
      Scented with ointments,

      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.

      • "Un mangeur d'opium," VII: Chagrins d'enfance [24]
  • Ah! miserable dog, if I had offered you a package of excrement, you would have smelled it with delight and perhaps devoured it. In this, poor companion of my sad life, you are like the public, to whom one must never present delicate perfumes, which exasperate them, but only carefully chosen filth.
    • "Le Chien et le Flacon"
  • Each man carries within himself his own dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we count filled with pleasure, with prosperous and effective action?
    • "L'invitation au voyage"

Le Spleen de Paris (1862)

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To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).

  • Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, rêvé le miracle d'une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?

    C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant.

    • Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness?

      Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal.

  • L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.
    • The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.
      • III: "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" [26]
  • Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance?
    • What matters an eternity of damnation to someone who has found in one second the infinity of joy?
      • IX: "Le Mauvais Vitrier" [27]
  • Et à quoi bon exécuter des projets, puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante?
    • What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough?
      • XXIV: "Les Projets" [28]
  • Il n'est pas de plaisir plus doux que de surprendre un homme en lui donnant plus qu'il n'espère.
    • There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
      • XXVIII: "La Fausse Monnaie" [29]
  • On n'est jamais excusable d'être méchant, mais il y a quelque mérite à savoir qu'on l'est; et le plus irréparable des vices est de faire le mal par bêtise.
    • To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
      • XXVIII: "La Fausse Monnaie"
  • L'âme est une chose si impalpable, si souvent inutile et quelquefois si gênante, que je n'éprouvai, quant à cette perte, qu'un peu moins d'émotion que si j'avais égaré, dans une promenade, ma carte de visite.
    • The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes so embarrassing that I suffered, upon losing it, a little less emotion than if I had mislaid, while out on a stroll, my calling-card.
      • XXIX: "Le Joueur généreux" [30]
  • La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.
    • The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.
      • XXIX: "Le Joueur généreux"; The devil describes having heard this statement made by a Parisian preacher
    • Paraphrased in The Usual Suspects as "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
  • Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit.
    • This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.
      • XLVIII: "Anywhere out of the world" [31]

Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

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Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining (1862) by Édouard Manet
  • Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté, l'enfance douée maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de matériaux involontairement amassée.
    • Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material.
      • III: "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant" [32]
  • L'observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito. L'amateur de la vie fait du monde sa famille, comme l'amateur du beau sexe compose sa famille de toutes les beautés trouvées, trouvables et introuvables; comme l'amateur de tableaux vit dans une société enchantée de rêves peints sur toile.
    • The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.
      • III: "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant"
  • La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.
    • Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
      • IV: "La modernite" [33]
  • A coup sûr, cet homme, tel que je l'ai dépeint, ce solitaire doué d'une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d'hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire.
    • Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.
      • IV: "La modernité" [34]
  • Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art.
    • Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.
      • XI: "Éloge du maquillage" [35]

Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887)

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Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

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French Wikisource; Gutenberg.org
  • Pour le commerçant, l’honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre.
    • For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
  • Il serait peut-être doux d'être alternativement victime et bourreau.
    • Perhaps it would be sweet to be, in turn, both victim and executioner.
  • La femme est naturelle, c'est-à-dire abominable.
    • A woman is natural: that is to say, abominable.
  • Être un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.
    • To be a serviceable man has always seemed to me something quite repulsive.
  • Il faut travailler, sinon par goût, au moins par désespoir, puisque, tout bien vérifié, travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser.
    • It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. As it turns out, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
  • Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan.
    • There are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan.
  • Il n’y a de gouvernement raisonnable et assuré que l’aristocratique. Monarchie ou république, basées sur la démocratie, sont également absurdes et faibles. Immense nausée des affiches.
    • There is no form of rational and assured government but aristocracy. Monarchy or republic based upon democracy are equally absurd and feeble—an immense nausea of placards.
  • Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables: le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer. Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l'écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des professions.
    • There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions.
  • Ne pouvant supprimer l'amour, l'Église a voulu au moins le désinfecter, et elle a fait le mariage.
    • Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
  • J'ai toujours été étonné qu'on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?
    • I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter churches. What talk can they have with God?
  • La femme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps.
    • Women do not know how to separate the soul from the body.
  • La jeune fille, ce qu'elle est en réalité.

    Une petite sotte et une petite salope; la plus grande imbécile unie à la plus grande dépravation.

    • This is what a girl really is.

      A little fool, a little slut; the greatest idiocy united with the greatest depravity.

  • Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion).
    • To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).

  • C'est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s'accorde.

    Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s'accorder.

    • It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other.

      If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.

  • On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant.
    • One can only forget about time by making use of it.
  • Faire son devoir tous les jours et se fier à Dieu, pour le lendemain.
    • To do one's duty every day and trust in God for tomorrow.
  • The more a man cultivates the arts, the less he gets hard. There is an ever more sensible divorce between the spirit and the brute. Only the brute gets a good hard-on, and fucking is the lyricism of the masses. To fuck is to aspire to enter another, and the artist never pulls out of himself.
  • There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one.… It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls the need to love.
  • The unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.

Fusées (1867)

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  • Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n'ait même pas besoin d'exister.

    Ce qui est créé par l’esprit est plus vivant que la matière.

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

      Whatever is created by the spirit is more alive than matter.

  • L’amour ressemblait fort à une torture ou à une opération chirurgicale.
    • The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
  • Aimer les femmes intelligentes est un plaisir de pédéraste.
    • To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast.
 
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
  • Ces beaux et grands navires, imperceptiblement balancés (dandinés) sur les eaux tranquilles, ces robustes navires, à l'air désœuvré et nostalgique, ne nous disent-ils pas dans une langue muette : Quand partons-nous pour le bonheur?
    • These tall and handsome ships, swaying imperceptibly on tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with their inactive, nostalgic appearance, don't they say to us in a speechless tongue: When do we cast off for happiness?
  • Je ne conçois guère (mon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcelé?) un type de Beauté où il n'y ait du Malheur. Appuyé sur — d'autres diraient: obsédé par — ces idées, on conçoit qu'il me serait difficile de en pas conclure que le plus parfait type de Beauté virile est Satan, — à la manière de Milton.
    • I can scarcely conceive (would my brain be a spellbound mirror?) a type of beauty without unhappiness. Supported by — others would say, obsessed by — these notions, one may conceive it would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, — as rendered by Milton.
  • Ce qu'il y a d'enivrant dans le mauvais goût, c'est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.
    • What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness.

L'art romantique (1869)

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It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb…
  • Le mot littérature de décadence implique qu'il y a une échelle de littératures, une vagissante, une puérile, une adolescente, etc. Ce terme, veux-je dire, suppose quelque chose de fatal et de providentiel, comme un décret inéluctable; et il est tout à fait injuste de nous reprocher d'accomplir la loi mystérieuse. Tout ce que je puis comprendre dans la parole académique, c'est qu'il est honteux d'obéir à cette loi avec plaisir, et que nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée.
    • The phrase "a literature of decadence" implies a scale of literature: infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. This term, I would say, supposes something fateful and providential, like an inescapable decree; and it is completely unjust to reproach us for the fulfillment of a law that is mysterious. All I can understand of this academic saying is that it is shameful to obey this law pleasurably, and that we are guilty of rejoicing in our destiny.
  • Le progrès, cette grande hérésie de la décrépitude.
  • Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion.
    • An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.
      • XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV [38]
  • C'est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, par et à travers la musique, que l'âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tombeau; et, quand un poème exquis amène les larmes au bord des yeux, ces larmes ne sont pas la preuve d'un excès de jouissance, elles sont bien plutôt le témoignage d'une mélancolie irritée, d'une postulation des nerfs, d'une nature exilée dans l'imparfait et qui voudrait s'emparer immédiatement, sur cette terre même, d'un paradis révélé.
    • It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
      • XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV
  • Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe, quelque chose de sacré qui nous défend d'en faire un jeu de hasard. Manier savamment une langue, c'est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire.
    • There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfuly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
      • XIV: "Théophile Gautier" [39], as translated in The Idea of Poetry in France : From Houdar de La Motte to Baudelaire (1958) by Margaret Gilman, p. 263
    • Variant translations:
    • There exists in the word, in the verb, something sacred which prohibits us from viewing it as a mere game of chance. To manipulate language with wisdom is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
      • As quoted in Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (1981) by Walter de Gruyter
    • There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
    • There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
  • Tous les grands poètes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques.
  • La Révolution a été faite par des voluptueux.
    • The Revolution had been made by voluptuaries.
      • "Les liaisons dangereuses," Appendix to L'art romantique [41]


Misattributed

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  • Dieu serait injuste si nous n'étions pas coupables.
    • God would be unjust if we were not guilty.
      • Blaise Pascal, Pensées: It is necessary that we were born guilty, or God would be unjust [Il faut que nous naissions coupables, ou Dieu serait injuste]. This is Pensée 431 in the Édition Gallimard, 1962. It is found in the section entitled "The Signs of True Religion" [Les Marques de la Vraie Religion]
      • English text, #489; French text, #205

Quotes about Charles Baudelaire

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The signature of Charles Baudelaire
  • Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.
    • W. H. Auden, "Tennyson," Introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (New York, Doubleday, 1944); later printed in Forewords & Afterwords (Random House, 1974, ISBN 0-394-71887-9), p. 232
  • The imagination eulogized by Baudelaire is in his own case more often than not a synonym for desire or despair. His critical exigencies are, like those of the profoundly sick man that he was, harsh and imperative and illusory in the sense of release temporarily obtained. Yet imagination is also the faculty that gives Baudelaire a royal sense of equality with other creative artists; he uses his status as a poet to boost his activities as a critic, claiming, with total justification in his case, that criticism is a creative affair, a fine rather than applied art.
Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,
Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:
Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,
Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other
Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;
The hidden harvest of luxurious time,
Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech,
And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep
Makes the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep:
And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,
Seeing as men sow men reap.
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Ave Atque Vale" (1871), stanza III, Fortnightly Review (January 1868; later published in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878)
  • Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.
    • Michael Hamburger, Introduction to his translation, Twenty Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire (1946; rev. ed. 1988)
  • Baudelaire's words about the albatross aptly apply to the nineteenth century: "He is affixed to the earth by his tent of giant wings.""
    • Osip Mandelstam THE NINETEENTH CENTURY translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)
  • Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art (art for the sake of art): sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose.
  • Poe with a cross, that's what you are, adored of the gangster age.
    • Karl Shapiro, "Baudelaire in Iowa," from The Bourgeois Poet (1964); printed in The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early & Late (University of Illinois Press, 1998, ISBN 0-252-06689-8), p. 148
  • The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.

    As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.

  • Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire — all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect — to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject — man's nervous and psychic being.
    • Paul Valéry, "Autour de Corot" (About Corot), preface to Vingt Estampes de Corot (Éditions des Bibliothèques Nationales, 1932); printed in Degas Manet Morisot (Princeton University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-691-01882-0), p. 136
  • Oh Baudelaire... He used to be enormously important to me. It's thanks to him that I was able to get through the war [in Paris, during 1940 – 1945 Van Velde had a long and painful break, with only a few paintings he finished]. A true loyal mind without hypocrisy. The most universal spirit. The greatest Frenchman. I have always been much less interested in painters [than Baudelaire - a great surprise to hear for Charles Juliet the interviewer].
    • Bram van Velde, in Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, ed. Charles Juliet, First Dalkey Archive edition, 2009, London and Champaign; 14 September 1967; p. 66
  • Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseauism in all its forms. Today, Rousseauism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.
    • Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 429
  • Notwithstanding his desperate effort to realize Poe’s idea, he [Baudelaire] only proved Poe correct, who had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there always will be something held back, something false ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions.
    • James Huneker, Introduction to The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire (1919), p. xi
  • But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God. And yet even he lived in too aestheticized a world; and the forms for which he is praised are really quite trite: the inventions of the unknown demand new forms.
    • Arthur Rimbaud : LETTER TO PAUL DEMENY, 1871. Charleville, 15 mai 1871.
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