“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
ArtAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“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“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“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“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 is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
Art“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“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
Art“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.”
Art“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“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“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“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“Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”
Religion“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
Respect“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty