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
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. – 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
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated. – Charles Baudelaire