Charles Baudelaire quotes

Not in that form. The sentence people quote is from the film The Usual Suspects (1995). Baudelaire's version, in the prose poem “Le Joueur généreux,” is that the devil's finest ruse is to persuade you he does not exist — the same thought, different words, and a different author for the famous phrasing.

Because the French is the poetry. The English lines here are plain prose renderings meant to carry the sense; the public-domain verse translations are selections that omit most of these poems, so pairing each quotation with the verified French is the honest way to show what Baudelaire actually wrote.

Sailors catch an albatross for amusement, and the bird that was magnificent in the air becomes clumsy and absurd on deck. The final stanza says the poet is the same creature: his giant's wings, which carry him above the storm, keep him from walking on the ground.

“Hypocrite reader” — the closing address of the poem that opens Les Fleurs du Mal, which has just accused the reader of sharing every appetite it catalogues, and then calls him its likeness and its brother. T. S. Eliot borrowed the line, untranslated, for The Waste Land.

Prosecuted rather than banned outright. In 1857 Baudelaire and his publisher were fined for offence to public morals, and six poems were ordered removed from the book; they were not legally restored in France until 1949.