Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

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

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

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

~ Arthur Rimbaud

À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

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

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple, Garlands from window to window, Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:From time to time my heart is like some oakWhose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

~ 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 Rimbaud

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

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

They find me odd, and whisper behind hands…And my brutal desires sink hooks into their lips…

~ Arthur Rimbaud

From castles of bone unknown music comes But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations,––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect thedancing and the voices which are only now esteemed. The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

No one's serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades

~ Arthur Rimbaud

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

~ Arthur Rimbaud

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Faith assuages guides restores.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.

~ 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