“Music fathoms the sky.”
Music
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
ArtAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food“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.”
Poetry“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.”
Poetry“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 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“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
Beauty“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
Art“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.”
Poetry“It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”
Beauty“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“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
Nature“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“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“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
Beauty“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.”
Beauty“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”
Art