Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who is known for his dark and intriguing observations about life. His quotes are often beautiful, but contain a hidden darkness that make you think twice. It’s perfect reading material for explorers! Whether he’s describing the excitement of journeying to new places or the beauty of seeing familiar sights from a new perspective, Baudelaire’s words are sure to inspire you to experience all that life has to offer.
So pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy these inspiring thoughts from Charles Baudelaire!
Charles Baudelaire Quotes
“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
Charles Baudelaire
“To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
Charles Baudelaire
“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
Charles Baudelaire
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Nothing can be done except little by little.”
Charles Baudelaire
“There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
Charles Baudelaire
“If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.”
Charles Baudelaire
“What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?”
Charles Baudelaire
“Nature…is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Through the Unknown, we’ll find the New”
Charles Baudelaire
“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Music fathoms the sky.”
Charles Baudelaire
“This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”
Charles Baudelaire
“In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.”
Charles Baudelaire
“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
Charles Baudelaire
“It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.”
Charles Baudelaire
“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
Charles Baudelaire
“All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
Charles Baudelaire
“One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
Charles Baudelaire
“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”
Charles Baudelaire
“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.”
Charles Baudelaire
“I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”
Charles Baudelaire
“There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.”
Charles Baudelaire
“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
Charles Baudelaire
“You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Discover day to day excitement.”
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire Quotes About the Flâneur
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not — to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas.”
Charles Baudelaire
“Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.”
Charles Baudelaire
“And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him — this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert — has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I now of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory.“
Charles Baudelaire
A Final Word
So what’s your favorite Charles Baudelaire quote? We’d love for you to share it in the comments!
In the meantime, keep these words of wisdom from Charles Beaudelaire in mind as you continue on your life journey: “Genius is nothing more than childhood recaptured at will.” It reminds us that we should all aim to stay curious and playful throughout our lives, and that the things we loved as kids can still bring us joy as adults.
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