Famous Baudelaire Quotes

He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.

The Death of the Poor”, by Baudelaire; that helped me enormously.’ The sublime verses came back to me immediately, as if they had always been present in a corner of my consciousness, as if my whole life had only been a more or less explicit commentary on them: Death, alas! consoles and brings to life; The end of it all, the solitary hope; We, drunk on death’s elixir, face the strife, Take heart, and climb till dusk the weary slope. All through the storm, the frost, and the snow, Death on our black horizon pulses clear; Death is the famous inn that we all know, Where we can rest and sleep and have good cheer.

When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' - DELLA VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne- Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the 'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.

The sixteenth-century artist Albrecht Dürer famously depicted Melancholy as a downcast angel surrounded by symbols of creativity, knowledge, and yearning: a polyhedron, an hourglass, a ladder ascending to the sky. The nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire could “scarcely conceive of a type of beauty” in which there is no melancholy. This romantic vision of melancholia has waxed and waned over time; most recently, it’s waned. In an influential 1918 essay, Sigmund Freud dismissed melancholy as narcissism, and ever since, it’s disappeared into the maw of psychopathology. Mainstream psychology sees it as synonymous with clinical depression.[*1]

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.

Given the title of this chapter, it would be fitting to close by citing Charles Baudelaire’s famous ode to intoxication, “Get Drunk”: You must always be drunk. Everything depends upon getting drunk, it is all that matters. In order to not feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and pushes you to the ground, you must be drunk, perpetually drunk. Drunk on what? On wine, on poetry or virtue, whatever your taste. But get drunk.

It’s working,” he said, and ran his tongue over his filthy teeth. “The sugar bowl is so close I can taste it!” Klaus took his commonplace book from his pocket, and read his notes intently for a moment. Then he turned to Justice Strauss. “Give me that book, please,” he said, pointing to Jerome Squalor’s book. “The third phrase is the famous unfathomable question in the best-known novel by Richard Wright. Richard Wright was an American novelist of the realist school whose writings illuminated the disparities in race relations. It is likely his work is quoted in a comprehensive history of injustice.” “You can’t read that entire book!” Count Olaf said. “The crowd will find us before you finish the first chapter!” “I’ll look in the index,” Klaus said, “just like I did at Aunt Josephine’s, when we decoded her note and found her hiding place.” “I always wondered how you did that,” Olaf said, sounding almost as if he admired the middle Baudelaire’s research skills. Klaus paged to the back of the book, where the index can usually be found. An index, as I’m sure you know, is a list of everything a book contains, and where each item can be found.