Louis Aragon Quotes & Sayings

In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth. — Louis Aragon

Geniuses are like ocean liners: they should never meet. — Louis Aragon

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself. — Louis Aragon

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

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. — Louis Aragon

The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book. — Louis Aragon

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished. — Louis Aragon

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. — Louis Aragon

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

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. — Louis Aragon

As if one could do what one wanted with one's own body! — Louis Aragon

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. — Louis Aragon

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

And when she's alone again, as truly alone in the world as she's always felt herself to be, she looks at herself in a bamboo-framed mirror. Beautiful face, aglow with the taste of carnal pleasure, disdainful and avid ... and above all an indefinable look in which can be sensed unspecified danger, sensuality triumphant and a sort of intoxicating vulgarity. She likes what she sees ... around her drifts a great brunette fragrance, scent of happy brunette, in which the idea of others dissolves. — Louis Aragon

Everything that is not me is incomprehensible. — Louis Aragon

As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him ... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify. — Louis Aragon

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. — Louis Aragon

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. — Louis Aragon

The painting of tomorrow will use the photographic eye as it has used the human eye. — Louis Aragon

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

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity ... — Louis Aragon

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

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe. — Louis Aragon

The carnal contact side by side, from heel to armpit, brings shudders that shake up nature like the flights of nocturnal birds. — Louis Aragon

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

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work. — Louis Aragon

And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile. — Louis Aragon

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style. — Louis Aragon

It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work. — Louis Aragon

Language was not given to man: he seized it. — Louis Aragon

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

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink. — Louis Aragon

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. — Louis Aragon

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

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. — Louis Aragon

I have no friends, there are only people I love. — Louis Aragon