Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire’s command to “get drunk” isn’t a frat-house toast; it’s a survival tactic in a century learning to measure life in schedules, wages, and deadlines. The real villain here is capital-T “Time,” figured as a tyrant that turns people into “martyred slaves” - exhausted, morally postured, quietly dying by the clock. Baudelaire’s genius is to flip intoxication from vice into resistance: an altered state as a protest against the modern condition.

The line works because it offers a dangerous freedom while keeping one foot in paradox. He doesn’t just endorse wine. He adds “poetry” and “virtue,” smuggling in a serious claim: any practice that suspends the self’s ordinary accounting can puncture Time’s regime. That triad is a sly manifesto for aesthetic experience and intensity. You can flee the clock with alcohol, yes, but also with art’s trance or even moral fervor - the point is not the substance but the continuous refusal to be flattened into minutes.

Context matters: Baudelaire writes out of mid-19th-century Paris, where urban speed, commodity culture, and bourgeois respectability squeezed the soul into something market-ready. “Without stopping!” reads like both seduction and warning. The demand is ecstatic, but it’s also bleak: if sobriety equals consciousness of Time’s theft, perpetual intoxication starts to look less like celebration than self-defense. Baudelaire sells escape, then lets you taste the desperation underneath.