Quotes by Charles Baudelaire

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable."

"It is from the womb of art that criticism was born."

"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."

"Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?"

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art."

"A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else."

"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."

"What is art? Prostitution."

"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."

"The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated."

"Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!"

"It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton."

"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy."

"Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction."

"For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."

"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams."

"Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them."

"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."

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry."

"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."

"Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."

"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."

"Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art."

"Music fathoms the sky."

"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine."

"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create."

"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."

"Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste."

"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."

"Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."