Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French poet, essayist, and critic. The British poet and essayist T. S. Eliot once said that Baudelaire was “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language.” Such admiration is even more extraordinary considering Baudelaire’s whole works consist merely of a single volume of poetry, a book of prose poems, criticism, and three volumes of translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire had an unhappy life. He was born to a wealthy family in Paris. However, when his father died when he was six, he revolted under the stern discipline of his stepfather. He got expelled from military school and squandered much of his inheritance on clothes, sex, and drugs. When Baudelaire turned 21, his family, worried about his eccentric behavior and debts, got a court order to seize the remainder of his inheritance and disbursed it in small allowances for the rest of his life.

Baudelaire started writing essays, criticism, and translations to fund his indulgences. Baudelaire lived in the worst neighborhoods of Paris and switched apartments frequently to escape creditors. He struggled with poor health throughout his life and died at 46. The posthumous publication of much of his writing allowed his mother to settle his many debts.

At 36, Baudelaire published his only collection of lyric poetry, Les Fleurs de Mal (1857, The Flowers of Evil,) considered one of the most significant collections of French poetry. The book’s adulation of free love, drunkenness, world-weariness, and despair has influenced generations of bohemian artists. Baudelaire gained instant celebrity as a poète maudit (cursed poet) when six of the 101 poems in Les Fleurs de Mal were censored out for their moral and sexual themes, which were then considered obscene and scandalous.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Baudelaire

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Wives, Marriage, One liners, Wine

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Thought

Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Sanity

Nothing can be done except little by little.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Little Things, Things, One Step at a Time

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Beauty

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Tourism, Travel

Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Cats

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Understanding

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.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Art, Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Love

Inspiration comes of working every day.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Work

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Boredom, Bores, Work

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Poetry, Art, Poets

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Originality, Innovation

Our religion is itself profoundly sad—a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language—so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Religion

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
Topics: Gambling, Soul

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Soldiers

Hypocrite reader—my fellow—my brother!
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Books, Reading

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings—woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general… only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Women

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Awareness

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Opportunities, Reality

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Secrets of Success, Beginnings

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Happiness

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
Topics: Immortality

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: The Present, Present

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man’s longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Vice, Virtue

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Evil

Nature is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Nature

If a certain assemblage of trees, of mountains, of waters, and of houses that we call a landscape is beautiful, it is not because of itself, but through me, through my own indulgence, through the thought or the sentiment that I attach to it
—Charles Baudelaire
Topics: Wilderness

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
—Charles Baudelaire

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