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There is 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.

Charles Baudelaire

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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
Word
Forbids
Language
Sorcery
Kind
Verb
Something
Verbs
Handle
Using
Cunningly
Sacred
Recklessly
Practice
Evocative

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
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Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
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Through the Unknown, we'll find the New
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The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.
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It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
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Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.
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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.
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There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
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To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).
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What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
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But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality And without knowing why they always say: Let's go!
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Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
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So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk.
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It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
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I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
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The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.
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Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.
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With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.
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I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.
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By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
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