Quote

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

Charles Baudelaire

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Baudelaire
Age: 46 †
Born: 1821
Born: April 9
Died: 1867
Died: August 30
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
Translator
Writer
Paris
France
Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire-Dufaÿs
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
Laughter
Sphinx
Neither
Whiteness
Tears
Swans
Movement
Rigid
Lines
Misunderstood
Hate
Snow
Heart
Lips
Untaught
Like
Sky
Displaces

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

Image
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
Charles Baudelaire
Image
This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Quand me me Dieu n'existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divineDieu est le seul e tre qui, pour re gner, n'ait me me pas besoin d'exister. Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holyand divine.God isthe only being who, inorder toreign, need not even exist.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous but we do not notice it.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Inspiration comes of working every day.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude Daguerre was his messiah.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Baudelaire
Image
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.
Charles Baudelaire