Help with a quote......

[pkbites]

There is a quote about how a person should always be drunk…who said it and what is the entire quote?

[TomH]

You might be thinking of a prose poem by Baudelaire called Get Drunk, which begins, “One should always be drunk.”

[bibliophage]

I suppose this is what TomH is referring to. He’s been dead since 1867, so I guess it’s in the public domain.

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

• Beaudelaire

The original would be in French, I suppose.

[bibliophage]

*Originally posted by bibliophage *
**I suppose this is what TomH is referring to. He’s been dead since 1867, so I guess it’s in the public domain. **

Sorry, Tom. I meant to say Baudelaire has been dead since 1867, not that you have been.

[tomndebb]

TomH posts from the grave!
KrispyOriginal vindicated!
DavidB retires is dismay!

[TomH]

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

(Besides which, I’d hate to do anything to vindicate Krispy)