Charles Baudelaire

You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.1855

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.

It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

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

The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.