Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.

Stéphane Mallarmé
The flesh, alas, is wearied; and I have read all the books there are.

Stéphane Mallarmé
I wait, but do not know for what or why
Or perhaps you are uttering the last bruised sighs,
Ignorant of the mystery and of your cries,
Of a childhood feeling its frozen gems
Being broken off at last amidst its dreams.

Stéphane Mallarmé
Away with those perfumes that do me harm!
I hate them, nurse, and would you have me feel
Their drunken vapors make my senses reel?

Stéphane Mallarmé
If only I'd chosen an easy work! But, precisely, I, who am sterile and crepuscular, have chosen a terrifying subject, whose sensations, if they are strong, reach the point of atrocity, and if they are vague, have the strange attitude of mystery. And my Verse hurts me at times, and wounds me as if it were of iron! I have, moreover, found an intimate and unique way of painting and noting down the very fleeting impressions. I should add, which is even more terrifying, that all these impressions follow one another as in a symphony, and I often have entire days when I ask myself if this impression can accompany that one, what is their relationship and effect … You can guess that I write few lines in a week.

Stéphane Mallarmé
The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.

Stéphane Mallarmé
The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.

Stéphane Mallarmé
The flesh is sorrowful, alas! And I've read all the books.

Stéphane Mallarmé
No more, I must sleep, forgetting the outrage,
On the thirsty sand lying, and as I delight
Open my mouth to wine's potent star!
Adieu, both! I shall see the shade you became.

Stéphane Mallarmé
A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.
In French: Coup de des jamis n'abolira le hasard

Stéphane Mallarmé
All alone I gave
Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.

Stéphane Mallarmé
A kiss would kill me, woman,
If beauty were not death...
By what attraction
Am I drawn, what morn forgotten by the prophets
That pours on the dying distance its sad rites?

Stéphane Mallarmé
Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only spiritual task there is.

Stéphane Mallarmé
I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.

Stéphane Mallarmé
It is in front of the the paper that the artist creates himself.

Stéphane Mallarmé
The whole world is made to end up in a beautiful book.

Stéphane Mallarmé
No water murmurs but what my flute pours
On the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind
Prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before
It scatters the sound in a waterless shower,
Is, on the horizon's unwrinkled space,
The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.

Stéphane Mallarmé
I am inventing a language that must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces. … the line of poetry in such a case should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation..

Stéphane Mallarmé
Magical shadow with symbolic powers!
A voice from the distant past, an evocation,
Is it not mine prepared for incantation?

Stéphane Mallarmé
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
When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!
No sunset, but the red awakening
Of the last day concluding everything
Struggles so sadly that time disappears,
The redness of apocalypse, whose tears
Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud
Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud
For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away
From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway
Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine
Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

Stéphane Mallarmé
Ah well, towards happiness others will lead me
With their tresses knotted to the horns of my brow:
You know, my passion, that purple and just ripe,
The pomegranates burst and murmur with bees;
And our blood, aflame for her who will take it,
Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire.

Stéphane Mallarmé
These nymphs I would perpetuate.
So clear
Their light carnation, that it floats in the air
Heavy with tufted slumbers. Was it a dream I loved?

Stéphane Mallarmé
The sun as it's halted
Miraculously exalted
Resumes its descent Incandescent.

Stéphane Mallarmé
Are you a living princess or her shadow?
Let me kiss your fingers and their rings, and bid you
Walk no longer in an unknown age...

Stéphane Mallarmé
Then shall I awake to the primitive fervour,
Straight and alone, 'neath antique floods of light,
Lilies and one of you all through my ingenuousness.

Stéphane Mallarmé
O Spirit of litigation, know,
When we keep silent in this season,
The stem of multiple lilies grew
Too large to be contained by reason

Stéphane Mallarmé
Hyperbole! can you not rise
In triumph from my memory,
A modern magic spell devise
As from an ironbound grammary:
For I inaugurate through science
The hymn of all hearts spiritual
In the labor of my patience,
Atlas, herbal, ritual.

Stéphane Mallarmé
Etna! 'tis amid you, visited by Venus
On your lava fields placing her candid feet,
When a sad stillness thunders wherein the flame dies.
I hold the queen!

Stéphane Mallarmé
My breast, though proofless, still attests a bite
Mysterious, due to some august tooth;
But enough! for confidant such mystery chose
The great double reed which one plays 'neath the blue.

Stéphane Mallarmé