Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Rimbaud
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Morality is the weakness of the brain.
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.
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
Misfortune was my god.
Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
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.
I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.
I is another.
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.
What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.
I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.
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.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn
Yet this is the watch by night.
Let us all accept new strength, and
real tenderness. And at dawn, armed
with glowing patience, we will enter
the cities of glory.
I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.
It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
No one's serious at seventeen.
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!
Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?
Eternity is the sun
mixed
with the sea
You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life.
On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths, And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat: Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul; And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy, through the countryside - as happy as if I were a woman. "Sensation
Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.
The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.
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.
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.
I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent
Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.
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.
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
...as for me, I am intact; and I don't care.
What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
...You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!
Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log.
Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought
He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.
The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea
Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Je est un autre. (I is someone else).
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.
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