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
art literature imitating-others
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
hate men two
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.
art criticism born
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
giving literature taste
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
hands lines lasts
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
beauty time aquariums
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.
use france facts
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
beauty useless ugly
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
progress literature decay
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
time funny-basketball originality
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
good-luck agreement people
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
memories years thousand
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
lying unique men
The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
dream reality common-sense
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.