Henri Michaux Quotes

Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric novels and poems written in an accessible yet erratic and unnerving style. His body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with psychedelic drugs, especially LSD and mescaline, which resulted in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

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✵ 24. May 1899 – 19. October 1984

Henri Michaux: 8 quotes0 likes

Famous Henri Michaux Quotes

“He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels”

“A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here.”

Preface to Ecuador (1929)

“It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.”

La Nuit des Bulgares in Plume (1938) (Used as introductory line in Jim Jarmusch's film "Dead Man".)

“It is almost an intellectual tradition to pay heed to the insane. In my case those that I most respect are the morons.”

Ecuador (1929)

“In my night, I besiege my King. I rise up steadily and I wring his neck. He regathers his strength, I come back at him, and wring his neck another time. I shake him, shake him like an old prune tree, and his crown trembles on his head. But nevertheless, he is my King, I know it and he knows it, and it is quite certain that I am at his service.”

Mon Roi, in La nuit remue (1935)

“A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage… And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad…”

Ecuador (1929)

“No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth's interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death.”

These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.
Ecuador (1929)

“You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.”

Ecuador (1929)

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