Louis Aragon Quotes

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

I have no friends, there are only people I love.

Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

Most people have never known solitude.... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

Everything that is not me is incomprehensible.

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.

It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.

I shall always rebel against any attempt to reduce a human being to a kind of mannequin, whose deeds and questions would be comprehensible like the deeds and gestures of monarchs recorded day after day in official communiques. Six months of a life cannot catalogue the vitality, the activity of an individual; only death stops development and then, what is important is the overall meaning of a life, not the details of that life, edifying to some, scandalous to others.

Language was not given to man: he seized it.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.

For each man there awaits... a particular image capable of annihilating the entire universe.

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.

Geniuses are like ocean liners: they should never meet.

O months of blossoming, months of transfigurations, May without cloud and June stabbed to the heart, I shall not ever forget the lilacs or the roses Nor those the spring has kept folded away apart.

What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.