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 can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Music fathoms the sky.
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
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.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
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.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
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.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
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.
Inspiration comes of working every day.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
We are all born marked for evil.
How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
What is art? Prostitution.
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.
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
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.
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
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.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
