“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty
“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
NatureAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“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“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“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
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“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”
Art“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
Beauty“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”
Beauty“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
Art“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”
Art“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
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“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry“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“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“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.”
Art“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