Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist and art critic. He was known both for his exquisite works and for his disorderly and extravagant life, which was not well regarded in the 19th century, causing him to be called ‘the Dante of a decadent era’ and entered on the list of ‘cursed poets’ of France.
In this article you will find a selection of the best phrases of Charles Baudelaire that express their way of conceiving life and art.
The most inspiring Charles Baudelaire phrases
Despite his decadent and bohemian lifestyle, which did not adapt to the standards of the time, his works in poetry were acclaimed and inspiring for future generations. Therefore, we bring a list with the best phrases by Charles Baudelaire that show his philosophy of life.
1. How many times will I have to shake my bells and kiss your mean forehead, sad caricature?
About the sacrifices we sometimes have to make.
2. For the child, lover of maps and engravings, the universe is equal to his immense appetite.
Never lose that insatiable spirit of curiosity about the world.
3. Show us in the cases of your rich memories those admirable jewels, made of stars and ethers.
In this phrase from Baudelaire, the author invites us to appreciate all our lived moments.
4. Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter?
What matters are the acts we do on this earth.
5. To know happiness you have to have the courage to swallow it.
To get where we want, we must move away from what prevents us from moving forward.
6. Love is a crime that cannot be carried out without an accomplice.
Love is a two-person game.
7. Terrible game of love, in which it is necessary for one of the players to lose self-control.
When we love, we tend to give all of ourselves without considering consequences.
8. How many arrows must I waste, oh my quiver, to hit that target of mystical character?
There are places that are impossible for us to reach
9. To tell the truth, I fear that my zeal has not brought me happiness.
For a time where social appearance was everything, Baudelaire may have been quite lonely.
10. For a few hours we do not have to have silence, but rather rest.
Rest is necessary in our life.
11. In order not to be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk without ceasing!, with wine, poetry or virtue, as you like.
You have to have some kind of distraction from social pressures.
12. I think there are few examples of a life more wasted than mine.
A man who was never fully understood.
13. Irregularity, that is, the unexpected, surprise or stupor are essential and characteristic elements of beauty.
The ingredients that make up real beauty.
14. Oh Beauty! Huge, horrible, naive monster! If your look, your smile, your foot open the door to an infinity that I love and have never known.
An impossible love and the longing to get there.
15. A book is a garden, an orchard, a store, a party, a company along the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
A book is a wonder enclosed in its pages.
16. The best remedy against all evils is work.
Work helps us grow and develop in the world.
17. It is through dreams that man communicates with the world of shadows that surrounds him.
It is a place to access the deepest part of ourselves.
18. She is beautiful and more than beautiful: she is surprising.
A beauty that goes beyond appearance.
19. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability.
It’s the way we can harness our creativity for something greater.
20. Always be a poet, even in prose.
Poetry can come in many forms.
21. Loquacious Humanity, which in its stubborn and crazy genius, today as before, with the light as a witness, shouts to God, in its angry agony.
Rhetoric about people’s complaints toward God.
22. To work, it is enough to be convinced of one thing: that working is less boring than having fun.
That is why it is so important to dedicate ourselves to something we love to do.
23. I am the wound and the knife!
We can hurt and be hurt in the same way.
24. Free man, you will always love the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite development of its waves, And your spirit is no less bitter abyss.
The sea is the maximum expression of freedom.
25. There are women who inspire desires to defeat them or enjoy them; but this instills the desire to die slowly before her eyes.
Different types of passions that ignite in the soul.
26. Your empty eyes are filled with nocturnal visions, and I see again and again reflected on your complexion Madness and horror, cold and taciturn.
Ghosts of past actions that never stop tormenting.
27. A great smile is a beautiful giant’s face.
The smile is the first beauty par excellence.
28. The greatest honor of the poet is to accomplish exactly what he had planned to do.
Leave in words everything you have inside.
29. The most irreparable of vices is doing evil out of foolishness.
Especially those people who let themselves be carried away by their envy and insist on being unhappy.
30. What is love? The longing to get out of oneself.
Do you think this is true about love?
31. What does eternal damnation matter to someone who has found for a second the infinite joy?
We focus on enjoying the present more than worrying about the future.
32. He who does not know how to populate his solitude, does not know how to be alone among a busy crowd.
If you don’t feel comfortable with yourself you will never feel accompanied, even if you are surrounded by thousands of people.
33. Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and has the additional merit of being palpable and human.
Dance is the expression of what music makes us feel.
34. His eyes are like stars in which the mystery vaguely sparkles, and his gaze illuminates like lightning: it is an explosion in the darkness.
An attraction that leaves a great impact.
35. Do not despise anyone’s sensitivity. Each person’s sensitivity is their genius.
Sensitivity is someone’s true calling card.
36. Art is long and time is short.
Art is perpetual and is always evolving.
37. This power needs solitude to develop freely; The more one concentrates, the more likely one is to dream fully and deeply.
Solitude is necessary in many cases to grow.
38. Blackness abounds in it; and what she inspires is nocturnal and profound.
A darkness that enchants, which is perceived as a unique beauty.
39. Dance is poetry with arms and legs.
Comparing dance with the magic of verses.
40. In order not to feel the horrible weight of Time that tires your back and bends you towards the earth, you have to get drunk without respite. But of what? Of wine, of poetry or of virtue, as you wish. But get drunk.
The addictions we must acquire.
41. I can hardly conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.
The poet believed that melancholy is the greatest of muses.
42. For the trader, even honesty is financial speculation.
Traders are the most distrustful people of all, with good reason.
43. Hate is a drunk at the back of a tavern, who constantly renews his thirst with drink.
People who hate others will always find new reasons to fuel their disdain.
44. Solitude is the state of genius and the chosen one.
A solitary state seems to be something that all geniuses have in common.
45. God would be unfair if we were not guilty.
Do we deserve everything bad that has happened in the world?
46. ​​What is created by the spirit is more alive than matter.
This is because it is created with true and honest will.
47. Two rights should be added to the list of human rights: the right to disorder and the right to leave.
Two rights that, for the poet, were necessary for true human freedom.
48. The energy in pleasure creates discomfort and positive suffering.
The only tiredness we never get tired of.
49. More than one flower regretfully unfolds its sweet perfume like a secret in deep solitudes.
Loneliness is part of life, we cannot escape it.
50. Wine is like man: you never know to what extent you can appreciate or despise it, love or hate it.
A strange comparison, but one that is quite accurate.
51. The poison of power that unnerves the despot.
Tyrant rulers allow themselves to be blinded by power.
52. I know that pain is the only nobility.
Pain, for Baudelaire, is the most real feeling of all.
53. It is never excusable to be evil, but there is some merit in knowing that one is.
Malice should focus on having determination, not on hurting others.
54. This need to forget his self in foreign flesh is what man nobly calls the need to love.
Many hide behind their relationships to forget about the sorrows in their lives.
55. Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
The most beautiful things are those that are unique and different.
56. Dreaming magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even to those who possess it.
It’s not just about imagining better things, but about having the ability to go for them to make them come true.
57. Nothing can be done except little by little.
It is better to go slowly but surely than in a hurry where we make irremediable mistakes.
58. God is the only being who did not even need to exist to reign.
The only ruler that most people admire.
59. How big the world is in the light of the lamps! And how small it is in the eyes of memory!
The world must be seen with the eyes of adventurers.
60. The worm will gnaw your skin like remorse.
The weight that constantly grows in our minds with regrets.
61. Pure love is a sun whose intensity absorbs all other tasks.
Love has the ability to eliminate all sadness.
62. It can be said that men fall asleep daily with an audacity that would seem incomprehensible if we did not know that it was the result of ignorance of the danger.
Ignorance is the worst disease of humanity.
63. Pleasure wears us out. Work strengthens us. Let’s choose.
A decision that can change the course of your life.
64. The lover, panting, leaning over his beauty, has the appearance of a dying man caressing his grave.
The weight of the delivery of a heart in love.
65. What a boring writer! A dusty unearther of chronicles! An annoying mess of descriptions.
There are writers who do not suit our tastes.
66. Life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. This one would like to suffer in front of the heater, and that one believes that he would improve next to the window.
An interesting way of seeing life.
67. Being a servile man has always seemed like a disgusting thing to me.
Despising the idea of ​​conforming to social norms.
68. Laughter is satanic, therefore, it is deeply human.
Laughter is a natural instinct of people.
69. Nations are like certain families: only in spite of themselves do they have great men.
A way of relating nations.
70. The most beautiful of the Devil’s tricks is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Many believers claim that this is the devil’s move par excellence.
71. There are only three beings who are worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. Know, kill, create.
Everyone offers valuable things to their society.
72. Every minute we feel crushed by the idea and sensation of time.
For those who do not know how to live, time is a sentence.
73. I am like a painter that a mocking god condemns to paint, Ah! About the darkness; Oh, cook of funeral appetites, I make my heart boil and eat.
A form of self-perception about their works.
74. You cannot forget time except by using it.
The way to master time is to learn from it and accept it.
75. Our sins are stubborn, our regrets are cowardly.
It’s never too late to do the things you want.
76. Remembering is just a new form of suffering.
The memory of what could not be is the sorrow that drags into the future.
77. In a social event, each person enjoys the others.
About enjoying other people’s misfortunes.
78. What is not slightly deformed looks useless.
Perfection is in things that are strange and natural.
79. You have given me your clay and I have turned it into gold.
As the saying goes: ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’
80. Modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, half of art.
Modernity is what happens now. But it’s not everything.
81. The years only leave our members disabled, and we have deformed the passions.
The passage of years does not have to affect how we are.
82. Those who say ‘I have bad luck’ are those who have not yet had enough success and ignore it.
It is important to celebrate every triumph, no matter how small it may seem. This is how we motivate ourselves to move forward.
83. A succession of small wills achieves a great result.
Objectives are achieved through small goals achieved.
84. Never give up on your dreams, the sane know nothing about the admirable dream of a madman!
All great things begin as dreams.
85. He who never woke up in an anonymous bed, next to a face that he will never see again, and did not leave a brothel at dawn, wanting to jump into a river out of physical disgust with existence, has been lost. something.
A sample of his extravagant behavior, which went beyond immoral.
86. A charm is a bottle of wine, a wife is a bottle of wine.
For Baudelaire, wine was something incredibly valuable.
87. Genius is nothing more than childhood recovered at will.
The ability to wander through our imagination without limits.
88. Fatality has a certain elasticity that is usually called human freedom.
Freedom can easily transform into decadence.
89. If the word does not exist, invent it; but first make sure it doesn’t exist.
Encouraging us to do new and original things.
- You may be interested: “What is creativity? Are we all “potential geniuses”?”
90. We make ourselves pay for our confessions at length, And we joyfully enter the muddy path, believing with vile tears to wash away all our stains.
Even if we confess our bad deeds, we must still pay the price for them.
91. Beautiful is always strange.
The things we love have a certain touch of strangeness.
92. Consenting to be decorated is recognizing the State or prince the right to judge us, enlighten us, etc.
A criticism of the pressure to follow social standards when they recognize the work you do.
93. Search no more for my heart; The beasts have devoured him.
There are people who cannot dedicate themselves to others, because they are too hurt to do so.
94. What is art? Prostitution.
A strange way of seeing art.
95. We feed our kind regrets, As beggars feed their misery.
Regret is the worst weight you can carry, since it is not easy to get rid of them.
96. A healthy man can go two days without eating, but not without poetry.
Culture is an essential part of any person.
97. The wonderful surrounds us and soaks us like the atmosphere, and yet we do not see it.
There are amazing things happening around us, but we are too blind to see it.
98. To skillfully handle a language is to practice some kind of evocative sorcery.
Never underestimate the importance of learning a new language.
99. There is no sweeter pleasure than surprising a man by giving him more than he expects.
Making them see your full potential.
100. Endure and persist; The current pain will be of benefit to you another time.
Many lessons can be learned from painful moments.