Charles Baudelaire quotes - page 9

If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible. (Charles Baudelaire)
My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist! View quote
Charles Baudelaire
What is it that brings on these moods of yours? Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. (Charles Baudelaire)
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter molecules do not constitute form. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of ou. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . then they fall down the curtains. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not. (Charles Baudelaire)
And yet to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself; and in the wasteland of desire your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
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. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
God would be unjust if we were not guilty. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness, and pleasure. View quote
Charles Baudelaire