Charles Baudelaire

Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

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.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté Luxe, calme et volupté There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

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

Everything for me becomes allegory

You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?

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.

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.

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.

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

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