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Baudelaire Quotes

Browse 49 quotes about Baudelaire.

Baudelaire Quotes

“I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)”

RealRealityDeathChildhoodConfusionMaturityAdolescenceDeath PenaltySurrealSymbolismCapital PunishmentInfantileSignBaudelaireSignificationMotor Vehicle Accident
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“In this watercolor Gavarni portrays an individual whose father was an industrialist and whose older brother was a distinguished professor. From the looks of him, Hippolyte Beauvisage Thomire had a keen eye for fashion in casual clothing, however. He represents the new generation of bourgeois consumers that emerged during the July Monarchy. He is the modern young man off the newly invented fashion plates and out of the cast of Balzac’s Human Comedy. Charles Baudelaire, the great cultural critic of Louis Philippe’s reign in latter years, called the artist Gavarni “the poet of official dandysme." Dandysme, Baudelaire said (in his famous essay “De l’heroisme de la vie moderne” [The heroism of modern life], which appeared in his review of the Salon of 1846), was “a modern thing.” By this he meant that it was a way for bourgeois men to use their clothing as a costume in order to stand out from the respectable, black-coated crowd in an age when aristocratic codes were crumbling and democratic values had not yet fully replaced them. The dandy was not Baudelaire’s “modern hero,” however. “The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality,” he wrote, “but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality.” That is why Baudelaire worshiped ambitious rebels, men who disguised themselves by dressing like everyone else. “For the heroes of the Iliad cannot hold a candle to you, Vautrin, Rastignac, Birotteau [all three were major characters in Balzac’s novels] . . . who did not dare to confess to the public what you went through under the macabre dress coat that all of us wear, or to you Honore de Balzac, the strangest, most romantic, and most poetic among all the characters created by your imagination,” Baudelaire declared.”

BalzacBaudelaireDandyism
Book:The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848
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“A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited. Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten." Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth. Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism. Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability. No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”

DecadenceDon JuanHamletImpressionismFaustBaudelaireGoetheIbsenDon QuixoteEdgar Allan PoeFalstaffDecadentsSymbolistMaupassantTurgenevFlaubertSancho Panza
Book:Silver Age of Russian Culture
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“The Soup and the Clouds My dear little mad beloved was serving my dinner, and I was looking out of the open dining room window contemplating those moving architectural marvels that God constructs out of mist, edifices of the impalpable. And as I looked I was saying to myself: “All those phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as my beloved’s beautiful eyes, as the green eyes of my mad monstrous little beloved.” All of a sudden I felt a terrible blow of a fist on my back and heard a husky and charming voice, an hysterical voice, a hoarse brandy voice, the voice of my dear little beloved, saying: “Aren’t you ever going to eat your soup, you damned bastard of a cloud-monger?”

CloudsSoupBaudelairePhantasmagoria
Book:Paris Spleen
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“Comienzan las alucinaciones. Los objetos exteriores adoptan apariencias monstruosas. Se te revelan en formas hasta entonces desconocidas. Luego se deforman, se transforman y, por fin, entran en tu ser o tú entras en ellos. Los equívocos más singulares, las más inexplicables transposiciones de ideas se producen. Los sonidos tienen color, los colores tienen música. Las notas musicales son númerosy resuelves con pasmosa rapidez prodigiosos cálculos aritméticos a medida que la música se desarrolla en tus oídos. Estás sentado y fumas; crees estar sentado en tu pipa y tu pipa te está fumando a ti; eres tú el que se exhala en forma de nubes azuladas.”

WineVinoBaudelaireHashishHachís
Book:On Wine and Hashish
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“What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not?”

Prose PoetryRomantic PoetryBaudelaireWorld LiteratureCrowley19th Century PoetryFrench Poetry In TranslationWorld Poetry
Author:Charles Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley
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“Nếu đã từng đọc Baudelaire, hẳn Yersin đã gia nhập chủ nghĩa cá nhân mà thi sĩ cho là tiến bộ đích thực chỉ tồn tại trong cá nhân và bởi chính cá nhân mà thôi. Yersin là một con người đơn độc. Ông biết rằng không sự kỳ vĩ nào được thực hiện ở số nhiều. Ông căm ghét bè nhóm, ở đó hàm lượng trí tuệ tỉ lệ nghịch với số lượng thành viên tạo nên đám đông ấy. Thiên tài luôn luôn đơn độc.”

IndividualismBaudelaireYersinIndividualism Society Psychology
Book:Peste & Choléra
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“Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.”

MenMindMeanPlayDreamActionCertainEmotionMeditationSubjectsEffectsKeysNervousCertaintyAnalysisAbstractBentPsychicsIrresistibleKeyboardsDominatingTheoristsSensuousWagnerBaudelaire
Author:Charles Baudelaire
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“The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.”

BeautifulTurnsPassionStruggleDivineCreaturesPracticalsBreadEarningHeartedAdorationLiving CreaturesDaily BreadSpinozaBaudelaireSars
Author:Julien Benda
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“The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

PeopleFactsCultureLeftForceMassCriticsConservativeBackgroundsEducatedRecognitionKitchenDimensionsProtestPlatoRidiculeDeprivedLeftistsHegelEstrangementMass CultureBaudelaireShelleyBackground MusicMausoleum
Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
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“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”

WritingIdeasHandsStuffBlackBirdObviousCriticalChainsAggressiveFrighteningBeesHomosexualUnderestimateMasculinityLeatherEmilyBlakeDizzyVisibilityBaudelaireSpenser
Author:Camille Paglia
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“Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.”

IfsBookStatesCharacterTodayGuyPassionEvilLiteratureWonderfulWrittenCenturyFlowerPeriodsYeahIncrediblesWorking ItTimeless19th CenturyAgelessFrench LiteratureBaudelaireDeep Passion
Author:Johnny Depp
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“An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.”

WorldMeanChildrenDoeBeautifulYoungSufferingWifeOld WomanRecitingBaudelaire
Author:Agnes Varda
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“I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed - they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry.”

PeopleThinkingDifferentDreamTogetherFilmFallEasyVisionArchitectureFantasticTapestryOpiumBaudelaire
Author:Kenneth Anger
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“And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.”

IfsGivingMaySaidTwoImportantHelpingWould BeFoundDyingRight NowGive MeSticksWoundedThirstThreatenedEldersBasketsRefrigeratorsStrawberriesPokeManiacsBaudelaireQuagmire
Author:Daniel Handler
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“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.”

WayMindSoulFoundHouseEmotionCrimeMinesDiseaseSickBottomLustMysteriousBurningSicknessYellowAbandonedFrighteningFeverGalleryMonstrousBreedingEnnuiAberrationUnexploredVegetationThoughts And EmotionsBaudelaireYellow FeverHatchingTetanus
Author:Joris-Karl Huysmans
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“Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.”

WritingStatesHelpingEyeLife IsCertainOrdinaryDepthPursueSymbolsIntimatePassagesGrandeurExteriorBaudelaire
Author:Gaston Bachelard
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“...then he looked at my T-shirt and saw Byron's picture on it and he quoted "She Walks in Beauty," which is like my favorite poem next to the one by Baudelaire about his girlfriend being nothing but worm food, except that Lily called that one first because Baudelaire is her fave poet and so she got the shirt with him on it, even though Byron is way more scrumptious and I would do him on sharp gravel if I had the chance. --from The Chronicles of Abby Normal”

IfsWayFirstsNextChanceWalksSawsPoetNormalMy FavoriteShirtsGirlfriendWormsT ShirtLiliesChroniclesGravelAbbyByronBaudelaireFave
Book:You Suck
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“In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphans' friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression wich here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them lonely". You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.”

WritingMeanPersonsSometimesCoursesLostParentExpressionNeededCallingLonelyFallenGrievingLoved OnesStoppingAcquaintanceOrphanSad TruthOne FriendBaudelaire
Author:Daniel Handler
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“Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.”

IfsMindBelieveNamesWonderfulArmsIntellectualWindowRoundsMassiveCharmingBrowsGreat WritersBaudelaire
Author:Stephen Fry
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“He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.”

WorldHas BeensArtRealMightWantedOrderDiesPrinciplesConditionsEffectsDrugElementsPreparedEverydayAffairAppealsBoredPreservesBoredomWorks Of ArtReal WorldIsolatedMasterpieceMight Have BeenImplicitBaudelaire
Book:Burning your boats: the collected short stories
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“I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.”

PeopleLongI CanImportantPlayCertainSongCoursesNamesRoomsTakenObjectsPersonalityActivityLong TimeNotesIncludingPhotographDearInstanceCollectionsItemsLong Time AgoOrphanBundlesAccordionsBlurrySad SongBaudelaire
Author:Daniel Handler
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“Waiting is one of life's hardships. It is hard enough to wait for chocolate cream pie while burnt roast beef is still on your plate. It is plenty difficult to wait for Halloween when the tedious month of September is still ahead of you. But to wait for one's adopted uncle to come home while a greedy and violent man is upstairs was one of the worst waits the Baudelaires had ever experienced.”

MenStillsHardEnoughHomeWaitingDifficultWorstMonthsViolentPlentyChocolateHardshipComing HomePlatesCreamPieSeptemberHalloweenUnclesGreedyAdoptedTediousBeefUpstairsBaudelaireRoast BeefViolent Man
Author:Daniel Handler
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“But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...”

WritingEndsReasonTodayGoneTomorrowSceneQuietCatDullPotPitsMatthewMiltonBaudelaireHere Today Gone Tomorrow
Author:Ken Kesey
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“We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.”

ThinkingMindLittlesEnoughHandsSeemsUnderstandingQualityWorstHonestBearsLateStupidityClockToo LateLegendsRighteousFinestWrathUrgencyNever Too LateBewilderedSense Of UrgencyBaudelaireMoralizing
Author:Lionel Trilling
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