Quotes from baudelaire charles ii

Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still linger on the horizon, like the last agony of day under the conquering might of its night; the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic all those complex feelings that war on one another in the heart of man at the solemn moments of life.

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

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude: to play upon crowds is an art; and he alone can plunge, at the expense of humankind, into a debauch of vitality, to whom a fairy has bequeathed in his cradle the love of masks and disguises, the hate of home and the passion of travel.

And yet to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself.

My head is quite literally becoming a diseased volcano. Great storms and mighty dawns.

It might be pleasant to be alternately victim and executioner.

Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen. In other words, is not creation the fall of God?

The world progresses only through misunderstanding.

What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!

The age is mad and talks nonsense in all areas, but above all where art is concerned, because of the heretical confusion between good and beauty. Everyone who seeks the pure ideal where art is concerned is regarded as a heretic in the eyes of the Muse and of art. So I'll speak of the idealist painters as if they were ill; sometimes they reveal genius, but it is a genius that is ailing.

Desire of pleasure binds us to the present.

O night! O refreshing dark! for me you are the summons to an inner feast, you are the deliverer from anguish! In the solitude of the plains, in the stony labyrinths of a city, scintillation of stars, outburst of gaslamps, you are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty!

What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.

Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble religions on imposture.