Quotes from Arthur Rimbaud

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

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

No one's serious at seventeen, When lindens line the promenades

Unhappiness was my god.

Misfortune was my god.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

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

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

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

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.

You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life.

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

True life is elsewhere

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

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.

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

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

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.

I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,Like actors in ancient plays.

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

My sad heart foams at the stern.

I! I who fashioned myself a sorcerer or an angel, who dispensed with all morality, I have come back to the earth.

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.