“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty
“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
BeautyAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“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.”
Family“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“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“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.”
Love“Music fathoms the sky.”
Music“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
Art“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
Beauty“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.”
Religion“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
Beauty“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.”
Nature“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
Work“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.”
Music“What is art? Prostitution.”
Art“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.”
Men“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
Art“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.”
Beauty“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”
Beauty“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”
Beauty