Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire; April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 April 1821
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
dream desire action
Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!
work want produce
The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
greatness men order
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.
dream work poor
Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.
women hair hands
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.
progress world misunderstanding
The world progresses only through misunderstanding.
eye imperfect-things joy
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.
love self needs
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
love creating church
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
happiness humble pride
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.
morning flower men
Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!
shops visible universe
All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.
archer wings clouds
The poet is like the prince of clouds Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer; Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.
infinity infinite barbs
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.