A biography for Charles Baudelairehasn’t been written yet.
“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”
“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
“To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.”
“Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”
“If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.”
“The Beautiful is always strange.”
“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
“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.”
“What is art? Prostitution.”
“Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.”
“As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”
“Inspiration comes of working every day.”
“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
“The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.”
“This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.”
“But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.”
“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.”
“Genius is childhood recalled at will.”