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.”

“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”

“What is art? Prostitution.”

“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.”

“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate good is always the product of an art.”

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

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

“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.”

“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”

“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”

“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”

“Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.”

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

“This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.”

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

“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.”

“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”

“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”