Quotes by

Charles Baudelaire

Music fathoms the sky. – 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

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

Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry. – Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation. – 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

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

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

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

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

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