Quotes from Louis Aragon

Language was not given to man: he seized it.

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.

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.

I shall always rebel against any attempt to reduce a human being to a kind of mannequin, whose deeds and questions would be comprehensible like the deeds and gestures of monarchs recorded day after day in official communiques. Six months of a life cannot catalogue the vitality, the activity of an individual; only death stops development and then, what is important is the overall meaning of a life, not the details of that life, edifying to some, scandalous to others.

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

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

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.

Most people have never known solitude.... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.

What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.

I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

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.

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

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. 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.

No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence.

Elle avait ce gout de l'absolu, rien n'etait jamais assez, rien n'etait quelque chose. Quiconque a ce gout de l'absolu, renonce par la meme au bonheur.

I have never sought out anything but scandal, and I cultivate it for its own sake.

Climb down into your idea, inhabit your idea, well-digger hanging from your rope. At first it was only an outline, a halo, and by now it has not got very far, and everywhere I touch upon things which are not that idea of yours, I touch that idea through everything that refutes it, the world expires along its shores. My idea, my idea clings to countless bonds. A long story and I am moved to pity by its scarred form, I kiss the imperfections of its foot.

comme il allait de con en con Il devint terriblement triste comme il allait de con en con Terriblement triste

Bérénice avait deux visages, cette nuit et ce jour.

Si on a regardé un homme jusqu'à ne plus voir en lui que ce qui le fait différent des autres, le particulier en lui, il est bouleversant de retrouver avec d'autant plus de force qu'on l'oubliait déjà, que l'essentiel en lui c'est ce qui ressemble aux autres

Tout ce qui fut sera pour peu qu'on s'en souvienne