Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Rimbaud - Page 2

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

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

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?

What am I doing here?

You will always be a hyena.

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

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

O seasons, O castles, What soul is without flaws? All its lore is known to me, Felicity, it enchants us all.

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

I could never throw Love out of the window.

Hay que ser absolutamente Moderno

There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man--hitherto detestable--having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.

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

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

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.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

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.

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

...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.

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.

...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

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

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

. . . be absolute moderne.

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

Faith assuages, guides, restores.

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.

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

True life is elsewhere

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.

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.

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

Unhappiness was my god.