Arthur Rimbaud quotes
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“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (1994). “Poems”, Everyman's Library
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“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (2013). “A Season in Hell”, p.27, Lulu Press, Inc
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“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“...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!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (2013). “A Season in Hell & Illuminations”, Modern Library
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“...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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud, Louise Varèse (2011). “A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat”, p.11, New Directions Publishing
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“Je est un autre. (I is someone else).”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (1962). “Rimbaud”
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“-But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“But the problem is to make the soul into a monster”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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....”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (2017). “A Season in Hell”, p.24, BookRix
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“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life ...”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (2009). “Collected Poems”, p.51, Oxford University Press
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“I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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...”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud, “Sensation”
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“O seasons, O castles, What soul is without flaws? All its lore is known to me, Felicity, it enchants us all.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“...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!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“I could never throw Love out of the window.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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?”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“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.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
“And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!”
-- Arthur Rimbaud -
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“What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?”
-- Arthur RimbaudSource : Arthur Rimbaud (1957). “Illuminations, and Other Prose Poems”, p.29, New Directions Publishing
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