Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

No one's serious at seventeen.

Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don't know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.

...as for me, I am intact; and I don't care.

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.

...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!

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

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

I could never throw Love out of the window.

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

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

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

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

True life is elsewhere

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

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

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.

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

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

Faith assuages, guides, restores.

All day long he was docile, intelligent, good, Though sometimes changing to a darker mood. He seemed hypocritical, could tell better lies, in the dark he saw dots of colors behind closed eyes, clenched fists, put his tongue out at his elder brother.

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.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

...You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

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

Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

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

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

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.

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