Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

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

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple;

garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

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.

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.

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

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

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

Hay que ser absolutamente Moderno

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength.

You don't know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.

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

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.

Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

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

And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! -- But the great Faith is Love!

No one's serious at seventeen.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

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.

True life is elsewhere

It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.

You will always be a hyena.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal.

A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.

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

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees --And I found her bitter --And I reviled her.

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

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

And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures

All day long he was docile, intelligent, good, Though sometimes changing to a darker mood. He seemed hypocritical, could tell better lies, in the dark he saw dots of colors behind closed eyes, clenched fists, put his tongue out at his elder brother.

Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.

I is another.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.

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

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.