Charles Baudelaire Quotes - Page 12

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• A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Passion, Art Is

  9 Copy quote

• Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Childhood, Genius

  Charles Baudelaire (1951). “My heart laid bare, and other prose writings”

  9 Copy quote

• Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there Up there the wonderful clouds!

  Charles Baudelaire

  Mother, Country, Brother

  Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (1970). “Paris Spleen, 1869”, p.1, New Directions Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• Genius is childhood recalled at will.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Childhood, Genius

  11 Copy quote

• From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Sun, Moments, That Moment

  Charles Baudelaire (1981). “Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists”, p.295, CUP Archive

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Independent, Men, Ideas

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Morning, Fall, Winter

  22 Copy quote

• The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Stupidity, Lazy, Talent

  4 Copy quote

• This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Photography, Art, Enemy

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• And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beautiful, Drunk, Madness

  4 Copy quote

• Eternal superiority of the Dandy.
  What is the Dandy?

  Charles Baudelaire

  Eternal, Dandy, Superiority

  Charles Baudelaire, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden (2006). “Intimate Journals”, p.72, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

• Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Ambition, Goal

  10 Copy quote

• In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Aristocracy, Literature, Ethics

  8 Copy quote

• Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Beautiful, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Morning, Drinking, Flower

  Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.14, David R. Godine Publisher

  10 Copy quote

• L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Queens, Imagination, Provinces

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Women, Hair, Hands

  "Les paradis artificiels". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1860.

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Love Is, Men, Giving

  Charles Baudelaire, Louise Varèse (1970). “Paris Spleen, 1869”, p.20, New Directions Publishing

  10 Copy quote

• It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Criticism, Born

  Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

  9 Copy quote

• I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

  Charles Baudelaire

  Seeds, Knows

  Robert Lowell, Charles Baudelaire (1968). “The Voyage: And Other Versions of Poems”

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• 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 our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Spring, Ambition, Cities

  Charles Baudelaire (2001). “The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo”, p.30

  16 Copy quote

• That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Mediocrity, Reign, Becoming

  5 Copy quote

• the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love

  Charles Baudelaire

  Moving, Hands, Devil

  Charles Baudelaire (2015). “Poems”, p.12, Everyman's Library

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Gambling, Soul, Nuisance

  88 Copy quote

• Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Men, Hideous, Idleness

  6 Copy quote

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