French Poet Quotes

Charles Baudelaire

Arthur Rimbaud

Guillaume Apollinaire

Anatole France

Alfred de Musset

Théophile Gautier

Jean de La Fontaine

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

This is not love, such has only its name and semblance, which loves no thing unless it gains from it.

Bernart de Ventadorn

Gaily! gaily! close our ranks!
Arm! Advance!
Hope of France!
Gaily! gaily! close our ranks!
Onward! Onward! Gauls and Franks!

Pierre-Jean de Béranger

In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.

Remy de Gourmont

In principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor? I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of workers will cry out. Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen to me: No, it is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs. To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not to us. And isn't all property theft?

Joseph Déjacque

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.

Adrienne Monnier

I beg to advise you of the following facts of which I happen to be the equally impartial and horrified witness.

Raymond Queneau

The light died out and left the sky,
We sighed and rose and said good-bye,
We had forgotten — He and I,
That he was dead, that I must die.

Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

When liberty, this austere goddess,
Comes down to console people on earth;
That she finds them seated, in their heavy troubles,
On a ground cracked a thousand and four hundred years ago,
Her work which everywhere encounters a rebellious ground
Is very laborious before emerging beautiful

Auguste-Marseille Barthélemy

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

To name an object is to take away three-fourths of the pleasure given by a poem. This pleasure consists in guessing little by little: to suggest it, that is the ideal.

Stéphane Mallarmé

How many have died without having given even one kiss to their chimera!

Théophile Gautier

In life's orchestra, the bike is the double bass. Hard to forget it

A friendship that can be ended / didn't ever start

Mellin de Saint-Gelais

There is no mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. They were not written by Shakespeare at all. They were all written by a total stranger, about whom all we know is that he was called Shakespeare.

Alphonse Allais

Ah, the whites! Their malignity and their omniscience—that was what made them terrifying!

To go away is to die a little, it is to die to that which one loves: everywhere and always, one leaves behind a part of oneself.

Edmond Haraucourt

When one has one good day in the year, one is not wholly unfortunate.

Marguerite de Navarre

I know everything, but I don't understand any of it.

My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of these joys?

Gérard de Nerval

Women live only in the emotion that love gives. An old lady confessed that she had loved much, when young: "Ah!" she exclaimed, "the exquisite pain of those days!"

Arsène Houssaye

Driven away by barbarian thrumming the Muse has spurned the six-footed exercise ever since she beheld these patrons seven feet high.

Sidonius Apollinaris

Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal.

Followers of trails and of seasons, breakers of camp in the little dawn wind, seekers of watercourses over the wrinkled rind of the world, o seekers, o finders of reasons to be up and be gone....

Saint-John Perse

Apollinaire asserted that Chirico's first paintings were done under the influence of kinesthetic disorders (migraines, colic, etc.)