French poet (1821-1867)
There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Evil comes up softly like a flower.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Epilogue"
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes emit confused words;
There man passes through the forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar looks.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Correspondences
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
attributed, Four French Symbolist Poets
The misery of the cuckold. It springs from his pride, from a false conception of honor and of happiness, and from a love foolishly turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It is ever the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Seven Old Men," Flowers of Evil
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
Sudden as a knife you thrust
into my sorry heart
and strong as a host of demons came,
gaudy and libertine,
to make in my corrupted mind
your bed and bedlam there;
Beast, who bind me to you close
as convict to his chains.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Vampire"
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?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française", Salon de 1859
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 ... 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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Un mangeur d'opium"
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
preface, Salon of 1846
It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Le poème du haschisch," Les Paradis Artificiels
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," L'art romantique
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,
When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,
And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,
Assumes control of fate's immortal loom.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Paris Spleen"
Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
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.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," L'art romantique
Come back, I beg you, and I shall be gentle and modest in my desires.... I won't say you'll find me no longer in love, but you cannot prevent my mind wandering around your arms, those beautiful hands of yours, your eyes which are the mainspring of life, and all your adorable earthly being. No, I know you cannot prevent it: but fear not, you are for me an object of worship, and I am incapable of defiling you.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
letter to Mme. Marie, 1852
In the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Favours of the Moon"