Charles Baudelaire

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

“Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.”

“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.”

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

“It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.”

“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.”

“It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”

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

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