Quotes from Arthur Rimbaud

I have seen starry archipelagoes! and islandsWhose raving skies are opened to the voyager:Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, in exile,A million golden birds, O future Vigor?

One must be absolutely modern.

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: vowels,Someday I shall recount your latent births.

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 long for Europe of the ancient parapets.

Baptism enslaved me.

Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.

I have bathed in the PoemOf the Sea…Devouring the green azures.

O seasons, O châteaux,What soul is without flaws?

Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.

I am the master of fantasy.

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

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.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

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

Eternity is the sun mixed with the sea

But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?

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

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

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

True life is elsewhere

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?

Morality is the weakness of the mind.