I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Meaning of the quote
Charles Baudelaire, the famous French poet, felt like he had experienced so much in his life that it was as if he had lived for a thousand years. Even though he was just one person, he had collected many memories and experiences that made him feel older and wiser than his actual age. The quote suggests that Baudelaire's mind was filled with so many thoughts, feelings, and recollections that it was as if he had lived an incredibly long life.
About Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, translator, and art critic known for his mastery of rhyme and rhythm, exoticism, and observations of real life in the rapidly industrializing Paris of the mid-19th century. His most famous work, ‘The Flowers of Evil,’ captures the changing nature of beauty during this time.
More quotes from Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Nothing can be done except little by little.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Music fathoms the sky.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Everything for me becomes allegory.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The 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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Even if it were proven that God didn’t exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Our religion is itself profoundly sad – a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language – so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
What is art? Prostitution.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
We are all born marked for evil.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
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.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Inspiration comes of working every day.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
Always be a poet, even in prose.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
French poet and critic (1821-1867)