Quotes by Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.
Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contours or the ob...
Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul.
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
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 ti...
The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed ...
Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more easily he w...
It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cad...
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning,...then they fall down the curtains.
The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bo...
As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
What is art? Prostitution.
"Modernity" signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
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.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
