Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire rigs the definition of “artist” as a kind of sensory double agent: someone drafted by beauty and, at the same time, condemned by it. The line turns on a wickedly modern premise - that refined taste isn’t a polite upgrade, it’s an amplifier. An “exquisite sense of beauty” doesn’t simply deliver pleasure; it intensifies perception until the world’s errors and abrasions become unavoidable. In other words, the artist’s gift arrives with a built-in hangover.

The phrasing matters. “Intoxicating pleasures” suggests not calm appreciation but compulsion, a high that overrides willpower. Then Baudelaire flips the glass: the very faculty that makes beauty radiant “implies and contains” an equal sensitivity to “deformities” and “disproportion.” That’s not moral disgust; it’s aesthetic pain. Ugliness isn’t just present - it’s loud. The artist, in this view, doesn’t choose critique; critique is the nervous system’s reflex.

Context sharpens the bite. Writing in mid-19th-century Paris, Baudelaire stands at the crossroads of Romanticism’s obsession with the sublime and modernity’s oncoming barrage: crowds, commodities, new architecture, visible poverty. His work (and his scandal) lives in the tension between ideal form and urban grit. This sentence justifies that attraction to “the ugly” not as provocation for its own sake, but as fidelity to perception. To see beauty clearly, he implies, is to become exquisitely intolerant of what misses the mark - and to turn that intolerance into art.