Stéphane Mallarmé > Quotes

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.”
― Stéphane Mallarme

“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
― Stephen Mallarme

“Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.”
― Stephane Mallarme

“In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.”
― Stéphane Mallarme

“It is in front of the the paper that the artist creates himself.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Letters

“I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.”
― Stephane Mallarme

“There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.”
― Mallarm

“La chair, hélas, est triste, et j'ai lu tous les livres.”
― Stephane Mallarme

“Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“I can see my reflection like that of an angel!
And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium
Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,
Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land
Where beauty flourishes.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“I go to see the shadow you have become.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, L'après Midi D'un Favne: Églogue

“...for we are always at one with the instrument of our magic spells.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“I see myself––an angel!––and I die;
the window may be art or mysticism, yet
I long for rebirth in the former sky
where Beauty blooms, my dream being my coronet!

But, alas, our low World is suzerain!
even in this retreat it can be too
loathsome––till the foul vomit of the Inane
drives me to stop my nose before the blue.

O Self familiar with these bitter things,
can the glass outraged by that monster be
shattered? can I flee with my featherless wings––
and risk falling through all eternity?”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse

“You made the sobbing white of lilies too,
tumbling lightly across a sea of sighs on
their dreamy way to weeping moonlight through
the azure incense of the pale horizon!”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse

“I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.”
― Stephane Mallarme, Mallarmé in Prose

“« Un grand écrivain se remarque au nombre de pages qu'il ne publie pas. »”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“وجدت الجمال حين وجدت العدم”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre”
― Mallarmé Stéphane 1842-1898

“From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:

Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;

The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!

And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!

Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!

Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“THE BOOK: A SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. It terrifies me to think of the qualities (among them genius, certainly) which the author of such a work will have to possess. I am one of the unpossessed. We will let that pass and imagine that it bears no author’s name. What, then, will the work itself be? I answer: a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion. Man’s duty is to observe with the eyes of the divinity; for if his connection with that divinity is to be made clear, it can be expressed only by the pages of the open book in front of him.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose

“Si tu veux nous nous aimerons
Avec tes lèvres sans le dire
Cette rose ne l'interromps
Qu'à verser un silence pire

Jamais de chants ne lancent prompts
Le scintillement du sourire
Si tu veux nous nous aimerons
Avec tes lèvres sans le dire

Muet muet entre les ronds
Sylphe dans la pourpre d'empire
Un baiser flambant se déchire
Jusqu'aux pointe des ailerons
Si tu veux nous nous aimerons.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas.” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“L'infinit sort du hasard, que vous avez nié.”
― Mallarmé Stéphane

“Кад се предмету каже име, уништава се три четвртине онога уживања у песми које се састоји у постепеном погађању: наговестити и евоцирати – то је оно што машту усхићује.

To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest it, that is the dream.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“exiled spirits, red
as the spotless toe of a seraph spread
with scarlet by the shame of rumpled dawns”
― Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose