Author Profile
Charles Baudelaire
1821 – 1867 • French • Poet
63
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 63 quotesAs a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.— 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.— Charles Baudelaire
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.— Charles Baudelaire
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.— Charles Baudelaire
In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.— Charles Baudelaire
Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.— Charles Baudelaire
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
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.— Charles Baudelaire
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.— Charles Baudelaire
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.— 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
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.— Charles Baudelaire
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.— Charles Baudelaire
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.— Charles Baudelaire