Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

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

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

Arthur Rimbaud
I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

Arthur Rimbaud
Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

Arthur Rimbaud
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Arthur Rimbaud
I went out under the sky, Muse! And I was your vassal.

Arthur Rimbaud
Sweeter than the flesh of tart apples to children, the green water penetrates my wooden hull.

Arthur Rimbaud
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?

Arthur Rimbaud
I have seen the sun set, stained with mystic horrors, illuminating the long violet [blood-] clots, just like actors in very ancient plays.

Arthur Rimbaud
I have bathed in the Poem of the Sea, steeped in stars, and milky, devouring the green azures.

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

Arthur Rimbaud
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

Arthur Rimbaud
I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log....

Arthur Rimbaud
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.

Arthur Rimbaud
I long for Europe of the ancient parapets.

Arthur Rimbaud
Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!

Arthur Rimbaud
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.

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

Arthur Rimbaud
I have seen starry archipelagos! And islands
Whose 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?

Arthur Rimbaud