Charles Baudelaire - Art Quotes

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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.

Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Charles Baudelaire
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Charles Baudelaire
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.

Charles Baudelaire
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

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

Charles Baudelaire
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

Charles Baudelaire
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Charles Baudelaire
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
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