Charles Baudelaire

“Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.”

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”

“أن تعرف يعني أن تتناقض. ثمة درجة من عدم التناقض لا يرقى إليها شيء سوى الكذب...”

“It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")”

“L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.”

“Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.”

“These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.”

“Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.”

“I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.”

“C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

“It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.”

“Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t'embrasser neuf fois.”

“Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”

“So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk. ”

“Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.”

“Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”

“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.”

“Charles Baudelaire: Get DrunkOne should always be drunk. That's all that matters; that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: 'It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!'-- Charles Baudelaire, tr. Michael Hamburger”

“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”

“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”

“La Terre est un gâteau plein de douceur.”

“Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.”

“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness”

“Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphereto a higher plane, and purify yourselfby drinking as if it were ambrosiathe fire that fills and fuels Emptiness.Free from the futile strivings and the careswhich dim existence to a realm of mist,happy is he who wings an upward wayon mighty pinions to the fields of light;whose thoughts like larks spontaneously riseinto the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked,outreaches life and readily comprehendsthe language of flowers and of all mute things.”

“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”

“That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.”

“It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.”

“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”

“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”

“Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom”

“We revel in the laxness of the path we take.”

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”

“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.”

“Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?”

“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.”

“Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?”

“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”

“A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.”

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”

“Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.”

“You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?”

“Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive. ”

“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

“Le ChatViens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux; Retiens les griffes de ta patte, Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux, Mêlés de métal et d'agate. Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir Ta tête et ton dos élastique, Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir De palper ton corps électrique, Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard, Comme le tien, aimable bête, Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard, Et, des pieds jusques à la tête, Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum, Nagent autour de son corps brun.”

“If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!”

“But the true voyagers are only those who leaveJust to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,They never turn aside from their fatalityAnd without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!”

“Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please.”

“He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.”

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”