Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Saint-John Perse

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French diplomat Saint-John Perse.

Last updated on April 17, 2025.

Alexis Leger, better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse, was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.

French - Diplomat | May 31, 1887 - September 20, 1975

Source: Wikipedia

Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet's hounds on the chase.

Saint-John Perse

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

Saint-John Perse

The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.

Saint-John Perse

It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.

Saint-John Perse

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.

Saint-John Perse

A world to be born under your footsteps.

Saint-John Perse

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

Saint-John Perse

Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and be gone.

Saint-John Perse

The only menace is inertia.

Saint-John Perse

Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Saint-John Perse

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