The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles BaudelaireRead
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Beauty often arises from imperfection and surprise.
Baudelaire suggests that true beauty is not found in perfect regularity, but rather in the unexpected and the irregular. The element of surprise, along with a certain degree of distortion or asymmetry, enhances our appreciation of beauty, making it more sensibly appealing to us.
Themes
BeautyImperfectionSurpriseArtIrregularity
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a speech about the value of creativity in art.
More from Charles Baudelaire
All quotes →Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
Charles BaudelaireRead
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
Charles BaudelaireRead
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
Charles BaudelaireRead
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Similar quotes
Somewhere along the line a convention developed that the opening of a film was just a laundry list of credits. There was no incentive to complicate an area that was settled.
Saul BassRead
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne PorterRead
The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.
Steven ZaillianRead
A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?
Martin GardnerRead
French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.
Michael PollanRead
Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Marc ChagallRead