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Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.

Charles Baudelaire
art

What is art? Prostitution.

Charles Baudelaire
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.

Charles Baudelaire
art

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Charles Baudelaire
art

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.

Charles Baudelaire
art

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Charles Baudelaire
art

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire
art

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.

Charles Baudelaire
art

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Charles Baudelaire
art

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Charles Baudelaire
art

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

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.

Charles Baudelaire

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

Charles Baudelaire

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Charles Baudelaire

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

Charles Baudelaire

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Charles Baudelaire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Charles Baudelaire

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire
men

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.

Charles Baudelaire
men

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky.

Charles Baudelaire

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Charles Baudelaire

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Charles Baudelaire

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.

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Charles Baudelaire

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire
sad

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire

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