Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
By Charles Baudelaire
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
By Charles Baudelaire
The past is interesting not only for the beauty which the artists for whom it was the present were able to extract from it, but also as past, ...
By Charles Baudelaire
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...
By Charles Baudelaire
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 ...
By Charles Baudelaire
Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contours or the ob...
By Charles Baudelaire
It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cad...
By Charles Baudelaire
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
By Charles Baudelaire
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
By Charles Baudelaire
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...
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 ti...
By Charles Baudelaire
'Modernity' signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
By Charles Baudelaire
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.
By Charles Baudelaire
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
By 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.
By Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
By Charles Baudelaire