01UndatedThe 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.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
02UndatedLooking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
03UndatedTo handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
04UndatedThe saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
05UndatedIl me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
06UndatedThe solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
07UndatedFlesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
08UndatedAnd yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
09UndatedHe who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
10UndatedI love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
11UndatedAs a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
13UndatedA 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.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
14UndatedGood 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.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
15UndatedGenius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
17UndatedIt is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
18UndatedNothing 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 loomCharles Baudelaire / quote ↗
19UndatedIsn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
20UndatedAnt swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeveCharles Baudelaire / quote ↗
22UndatedWhat is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
24UndatedIn putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it.Charles Baudelaire / quote ↗
