“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food
“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.”
MusicAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
Beauty“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“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
Respect“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“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty“Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?”
Art“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
Work“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“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
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“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”
Art“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Poetry“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“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“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
Nature