Aimé Césaire Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

Aimé Césaire
And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear....

Aimé Césaire
Whoever would not comprehend me would not
comprehend the roaring of the tiger.

Aimé Césaire
At the end of dawn, the city—flat,
sprawled, tripped up by its common sense, inert,
winded under the geometric weight of its eternally
renewed cross, at odds with its fate, mute, baffled,
unable to circulate the pith of this ground, embarrassed,
lopped, reduced, cut off from fauna and flora.

Aimé Césaire
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

Aimé Césaire
My negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Aimé Césaire
I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.

Aimé Césaire
My Negritude is not a stone, its deafness thrown
against the clamor of the day my Negritude is not a speak of dead water on
the dead eye of earth my Negritude is neither tower nor cathedral.

Aimé Césaire
I should come back to this land of mine
and say to it: "Embrace me without fear.... If all
I can do is speak, at least I shall speak for you."

Aimé Césaire
My name—an offense; my Christian name—humiliation; my status—a rebel; my age—the stone age. [The Rebel] My race—the human race. My religion—brotherhood. [The Mother]

Aimé Césaire
And my original geography also; the map of the
world made for my use, not painted the arbitrary
colors of scientists, but with the geometry of my
shed blood. I accept.

Aimé Césaire