Quotes from Louis Aragon

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

For each man there awaits... a particular image capable of annihilating the entire universe.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

The carnal contact side by side, from heel to armpit, brings shudders that shake up nature like the flights of nocturnal birds.

Language was not given to man: he seized it.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

I have no friends, there are only people I love.

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished.

Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Croire au soleil quand tombe l'eau.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book.

Everything that is not me is incomprehensible.

In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.

It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work.

40 months of blossoming, months of transfiguration, May without cloud and June stabbed to the heart, I shall not ever forget the lilacs or the roses Nor those the spring has kept folded away apart.

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.