Quote

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Charles Baudelaire

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Baudelaire
Age: 46 †
Born: 1821
Born: April 9
Died: 1867
Died: August 30
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
Translator
Writer
Paris
France
Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire-Dufaÿs
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
Like
Sky
Displaces
Laughter
Sphinx
Neither
Whiteness
Tears
Swans
Movement
Rigid
Lines
Misunderstood
Hate
Snow
Heart
Lips
Untaught

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Image
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Ne cherchez plus mon coeur les be tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart wild beasts ate it.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
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.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Wine transforms moles into eagles.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
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.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Quand me me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.
Charles Baudelaire