“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
More from Charles Baudelaire on Art
“Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.”
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”
“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
John Keats
10 quotes“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”
W.H. Auden
7 quotes“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of...”
Steven Pressfield
7 quotes“...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.”