Quotes & Sayings About Rimbaud

I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud). — Milan Kundera

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 Rimbaud

Priests, professors, masters, you are wrong to turn me over to Justice. I have never belonged to this people. I have never been Christian. I am of the race that sang under torture. I do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense, I am a brute. — Arthur Rimbaud

I could never throw Love out of the window. — Arthur Rimbaud

The hallucinations are innumerable. That's what has always been the matter with me, in fact: no belief in history, obliviousness of principles. I shall say no more about this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times the richest, let's be as miserly as the sea. — Arthur Rimbaud

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun. — Arthur Rimbaud

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind. — Andrea Dworkin

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

When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend. — Patti Smith

Cement in bold relief, - far underground. I lean my elbows on the table, and the lamp lights brightly the newspapers I am fool enough to re-read, and the absurd books. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

turn your face towards the lances of rain, the soul towards ancient wisdom. And — Arthur Rimbaud

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I'd rather remain silent — Arthur Rimbaud

But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God. — Arthur Rimbaud

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen. — Arthur Rimbaud

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure. — Arthur Rimbaud

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

O great Ariadne who pour out your tears
On the shore, as you see, out there on the waves,
The sail of Theseus flying white under the sun,
O sweet virgin child whom a night has broken,
Be silent!
-Sun and Flesh (Credo in Unam) — 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

I will never possess my hand. — Arthur Rimbaud

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. — Arthur Rimbaud

I am the saint at prayer on the terrace like the peaceful beasts that graze down to the sea of Palestine.
I am the scholar of the dark armchair. Branches and rain hurl themselves at the windows of my library.
I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods; the roar of the sluices drowns my steps. I can see for a long time the melancholy wash of the setting sun.
I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky.
The paths are rough. The hillocks are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away are the birds and the springs! It can only be the end of the world ahead. — Arthur Rimbaud

Against snow, a tall Beautiful Being. Whistlings of death and circles of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a ghost; scarlet and black wounds open in the magnificent flesh. — Arthur Rimbaud

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses — Arthur Rimbaud

A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being "eternal children", etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art and words can change the world. — John Thomas Allen

After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, doing so both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a businessman, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother's expectations of him. Although Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to western France immediately before that, where he was looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother's love ended in the prison of childhood. — Alice Miller

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge. — Arthur Rimbaud

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you? — Arthur Rimbaud

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

The world progresses! Why shouldn't it turn as well? — Arthur Rimbaud

I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain. — 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

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own. — Arthur Rimbaud

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one
and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ... So the poet is actually a thief of Fire! — Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together. — Patti Smith

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism. — Iggy Pop

By being too sensitive I have wasted my life. — Arthur Rimbaud

What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death! — 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

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

True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'. — Arthur Rimbaud

I'm intact, and I don't give a damn. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer. — Rachel Kushner

If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries. — Richard Elman

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

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

From castles of bone unknown music comes — 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

Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire! — Arthur Rimbaud

But these ideas were no more than abstractions because, despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detesting his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal. Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are often fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud — Alice Miller

All of my role models, whether it was the disciples, or John the Baptist or Arthur Rimbaud, slept under the stars. — Patti Smith

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos. — Assia Djebar

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. — J.G. Ballard

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you. — Arthur Rimbaud

You will always be a hyena. — Arthur Rimbaud

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races — Jack Kerouac

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments! — Rimbaud Arthur

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 wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable. — Arthur Rimbaud

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity. — Arthur Rimbaud

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea — Arthur Rimbaud

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

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes. — J.G. Ballard

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest - dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens, - young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the "dear body" and "dear heart." II — Arthur Rimbaud

The same bourgeois magic everywhere the mail train sets you down. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. So patient have I been That I've forgetten everything: Fear and suffering Have departed for the heavens, And an unholy thirst Darkens my veins. Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. Like the field Left to forgetfulness, Growing and flowering With incense and weeds, And the fierce buzzing Of dirty flies. Let it come, let it come The time that we will love. I loved the desert, burnt orchards, musty shops, tepid drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys, and with eyes closed I offered myself to the sun, the god of fire. — Arthur Rimbaud

When we are strongest- who draws back?
Most merry- who falls down laughing?
When we are very bad,- what can they do to us? — Arthur Rimbaud

The role of Rimbaud is one of the most important roles to play for a young actor. — Leonardo DiCaprio

I shed more tears than God could ever have required. — Arthur Rimbaud

In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me. — 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

I am hidden and I am not. — Arthur Rimbaud

Pagan blood returns! — Arthur Rimbaud

All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality. — Patricia Duncker

It is found again.
What? Eternity.
It is the sea
Gone with the sun. — Arthur Rimbaud

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young," [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture - the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of 'the wild' from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. 'Deranging the senses' was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

"Today," he continued, "the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. — Peter Coyote

As for me, I am intact; and I don't care. — Arthur Rimbaud

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

Time in the heart and sequence in the brain

Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
And let us then take godhead by the neck
And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric. — Conrad Aiken

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. — Albert Camus

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth. — 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

A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he? — Arthur Rimbaud

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 — Arthur Rimbaud

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity. — Eric Cantona

True life is elsewhere — 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

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster — Arthur Rimbaud

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca. — Patti Smith

I have withered within me all human hope. With every silent leap of a sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy.
I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of madness. — Arthur Rimbaud

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics! — Arthur Rimbaud

Unhappiness was my god. — Arthur Rimbaud

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal. — Arthur Rimbaud