“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry
“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
BeautyAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“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“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
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“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
Beauty“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“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.”
Art“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“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“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”
Art“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.”
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“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
Art“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”
Art“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
Respect“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“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“What is art? Prostitution.”
Art“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