Charles Pierre Baudelaire was an influential nineteenth century French poet, critic and acclaimed translator.
More on Wikipedia…
(78 quotes found)
“Listen, my darling, listen to soft night approaching.”
Charles Baudelaire
“All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.”
“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.”
“It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.”
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
“One must astonish the bourgeois.”
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.”
“There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.”