Charles Baudelaire: Quotes about beauty

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.
III: "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose_-_III._Le_Confiteor_de_l%27artiste
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
Source: Twenty Prose Poems

Beauty , Study

“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.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

L'observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito. L'amateur de la vie fait du monde sa famille, comme l'amateur du beau sexe compose sa famille de toutes les beautés trouvées, trouvables et introuvables; comme l'amateur de tableaux vit dans une société enchantée de rêves peints sur toile.
III: "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant"
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Life , World , Family , Beauty

“There, all is order and beauty only,
Splendor, peace, and pleasure.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
"L'Invitation au Voyage" [Invitation to the Voyage] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Invitation_au_voyage_%28Les_Fleurs_du_mal%29
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Pleasure , Peace , Beauty

“I can scarcely conceive (would my brain be a spellbound mirror?) a type of beauty without unhappiness. Supported by — others would say, obsessed by — these notions, one may conceive it would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, — as rendered by Milton.”

Charles Baudelaire

Je ne conçois guère (mon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcelé?) un type de Beauté où il n'y ait du Malheur. Appuyé sur — d'autres diraient: obsédé par — ces idées, on conçoit qu'il me serait difficile de en pas conclure que le plus parfait type de Beauté virile est Satan, — à la manière de Milton.
XVI http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Fus%C3%A9es#XVI
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Fusées (1867)

Beauty , Support , Perfection

“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.”

Charles Baudelaire

Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#IV
L'art romantique (1869)

Beauty , Sense , Time

“All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.”

Charles Baudelaire

Toutes les beautés contiennent, comme tous les phénomènes possibles, quelque chose d'éternel et quelque chose de transitoire — d'absolu et de particulier.
"De l'héroïsme de la vie moderne," Salon de 1846, XVIII (1846) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Salon_de_1846_%28Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques%29#XVIII._.E2.80.94_De_l.E2.80.99h.C3.A9ro.C3.AFsme_de_la_vie_moderne

Beauty

“I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.”

Charles Baudelaire

People , Food , Beauty , Dogs