Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”

“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”

“Eternity is the sun
mixed
with the sea”

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”

“I'm intact, and I don't give a damn.”

“To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”

“Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade?”

“But, true, I’ve wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.”

“My sad heart foams at the stern.”

“Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.”

“I have bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea…
Devouring the green azures.”

“The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea”

“It is found again.
What? Eternity.
It is the sea
Gone with the sun.”

“I could never throw Love out of the window.”

“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star… And I dance.”

“Love… no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

“But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.”

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met.”

“True life is elsewhere”

“Unhappiness was my god.”

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”

“I is another.”

“Then you'll feel your cheek scratched…
A little kiss, like a crazy spider,
Will run round your neck…

And you'll say to me : "Find it!" bending your head
- And we'll take a long time to find that creature
- Which travels a lot…”

“One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap. — And I found her bitter. — And I cursed her.”

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

“What am I doing here?”

“Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.”

“But the problem is to make the soul into a monster”

“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”

“I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”

“As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”

“The wolf howled under the leaves
And spit out the prettiest feathers
Of his meal of fowl:
Like him I consume myself.”

“Morality is the weakness of the mind.”

“You will always be a hyena.”

“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

“My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?”

“It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”

“In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.”

“Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?”

“No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades”

“I have embraced the summer dawn.”

“I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,
Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,
Like actors in ancient plays.”

“Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: vowels,
Someday I shall recount your latent births.”

“One must be absolutely modern.”

“I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.”

“Oh my little mistresses,
How I hate you!”

“Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.”

“O seasons, O castles,
What soul is without flaws?”

“Sweeter than apples to children
The green water spurted through my pine-wood hull.”

“I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.”

“I! I who fashioned myself a sorcerer or an angel, who dispensed with all morality, I have come back to earth.”

“Love is to be reinvented, that is clear.”

“I have seen starry archipelagoes! and islands
Whose raving skies are opened to the voyager:
Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, in exile,
A million golden birds, O future Vigor?”

“My tavern was the Big Bear.
My stars in the sky rustled softly.”

“It rains softly on the town.”

“Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.”

“Baptism enslaved me.”

“And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!”

“I is an other.”