“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
Art
“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.”
ReligionAll Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
“Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.”
Religion“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
Beauty“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
Food“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.”
Art“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“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
Art“Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
Dreams“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“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”
Beauty“Music fathoms the sky.”
Music“What is art? Prostitution.”
Art“Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!”
Beauty“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
Finance“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“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“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“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“Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
Best