Arthur Rimbaud Quotes - Page 3

No one's serious at seventeen.

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

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

You will always be a hyena.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

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.

Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!

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

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?

Hay que ser absolutamente Moderno

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

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.

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

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.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

True life is elsewhere

...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!

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?

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.

...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.

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.