Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s sly consolation is that ugliness never gets the last word. He writes from inside the 19th century’s churn of revolution, industrial grime, and moral panic, when Paris was being rebuilt and modern life was starting to feel like a machine that eats souls. Calling earlier eras “monstrous and foolish” isn’t just historical snobbery; it’s a way of admitting how easily any age can look barbaric once its costumes and justifications rot. The twist is that he refuses the standard moral lesson (progress, enlightenment, purification). Instead he bets on appetite: beauty not as virtue, but as hunger.

That choice matters. “Immortal appetite” makes aesthetics bodily, persistent, a craving that survives regimes, plagues, and stupidity. Baudelaire, the poet who made “spleen” a signature, isn’t claiming people are secretly good. He’s claiming they’re irrepressibly desirous - and that desire keeps inventing forms to feed itself. Even the grotesque century produces its own counter-splendor: cathedrals rising out of feudal violence, court music amid dynastic cruelty, a street poster glowing against soot.

The subtext is defensive and insurgent. If the world is a trash fire, the artist isn’t a decorator for the ruling class; he’s a contraband dealer, smuggling sensation and meaning through history’s worst moods. Beauty becomes less a reward for being civilized than a refusal to let civilization’s failures define what humans are allowed to feel.