Arthur Rimbaud > Quotes

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn”
― Rimbaud

“By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

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

“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, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“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.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems and Letters

“I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

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

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“I is another.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes

“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

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

(In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.)”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell & Other Poems

“Je est un autre.”
― Rimbaud

“I'm intact, and I don't give a damn.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“But the problem is to make the soul into a monster”
― 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, Complete Works

“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 with a woman.

"Sensation”
― 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

“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes

“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

“Elle est retrouvée!
Quoi? -l'Éternité.
C'est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes