Welcome to a world drenched in exquisite passion, cloaked in alluring mystery, and brimming with sensual depth! Today, we are going to journey through “50 Sensual Charles Baudelaire Quotes” that will strike chords within your soul, stir your deepest emotions, and lead you to question the very essence of desire and beauty. Let's dive deep into the ocean of Baudelaire's provocative verses and draw inspiration from the pearls of his wisdom that keep intriguing minds even today.
Now, who was Charles Baudelaire, you ask? He was none other than the 19th-century French poet infamous for his audacious collection, “Les Fleurs du mal” (The Flowers of Evil). But here's an engaging story: Baudelaire was not just a poet but also a critic, an essayist, and a pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His unorthodox and groundbreaking use of sensual themes and symbolism was once considered scandalous, leading to the banning of his masterwork. Yet, the world couldn't resist his enigmatic charm, and today, “Charles Baudelaire Quotes” are celebrated for their raw beauty, touching many hearts across the globe. Buckle up for an intoxicating journey of love, desire, and the exploration of the darker corners of the human soul through Baudelaire's penetrating lens.
The Tender Flames of Desire
1. “There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
2. “It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb.”
3. “One should always be drunk. That's all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.”
4. “Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”
5. “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
6. “I have more memories than if I'd lived a thousand years.”
7. “I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”
8. “To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
9. “The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.”
10. “A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”
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Shadowed Corners of Love
- “Everything for me becomes allegory.”
- “Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.”
- “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.”
- “Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.”
- “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
- “In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
- “What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.”
- “Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”
- “There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
- “Nothing can be done except little by little.”
Resplendent Whispers of Passion
- “Inspiration comes of working every day.”
- “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.”
- “It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
- “A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
- “To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.”
- “I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
- “It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair.”
- “There is in the act of love a great resemblance to torture or to a surgical operation.”
- “This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.”
- “Music fathoms the sky.”
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Profound Echoes of Yearning
- “Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
- “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.”
- “I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
- “Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities, of the intersecting of their myriad relations.”
- “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.”
- “I can't help but feel the suffering of beggars; I identify with them too deeply. And yet, perhaps out of weakness, I am scarcely polite to them. When I see them in their misery and despair, the idea of their maker is too vividly impressed upon me.”
- “The beautiful is always bizarre.”
- “Always be a poet, even in prose.”
- “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
- “An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.”
The Delicate Dance of Despair and Desire
- “Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
- “Love is space and time measured by the heart.”
- “We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”
- “The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.”
- “It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
- “That heart which flutters like a fledgling bird, I shall tear, bleeding, from his breast, to pitch it in the dust and venomous spit of the streets.”
- “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.”
- “The man who says his wife can't take a joke, forgets that she took him.”
- “You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.”
- “The poet is like the prince of clouds who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer.”
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