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

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

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

This empire [Russia], vast as it is, is only a prison to which the emperor holds the key.

Marquis de Custine

Young man untroubled by melancholy, fair as an Italian sun, take good care of your fine carelessness.

Théodore de Banville

If you want to love
Do so
To the ends of the earth
With no shortcuts
Do so
As the crow flies.

Véronique Tadjo

Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heretics. There are no heresies in a dead religion.

What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.

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)

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams.

Ivan Chtcheglov

Even so the Blood (bred of good nourishment) By divers Pipes to all the body sent, Turns here to Bones there changes into Nerves; Here is made Marrow, there for Muscles serves.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

And also there's a little star
So white a virgin's it must be:—
Perhaps the lamp my love in heaven
Hangs out to light the way for me.

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

With my teeth
I have seized life
Upon the knife of my youth.
With my lips today,
With my lips alone…

Farewell sadness
Good-day sadness
You are inscribed in the lines of the ceiling.

A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.

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

The snail will get to Easter just as soon.

Eustache Deschamps

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

Adrienne Monnier

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

I am Arnaut who love the wind,
And chase the hare with the ox,
And swim against the torrent.

If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.

Charles Baudelaire

Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

Jean de La Fontaine

The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.

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