Quotes by Arthur Rimbaud

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,through the countryside - as happy as if I were a woman. Sensation

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.

Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts.

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

The same bourgeois magic everywhere the mail train sets you down.

Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

They find me odd, and whisper behind hands…And my brutal desires sink hooks into their lips…

From castles of bone unknown music comes But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations,––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect thedancing and the voices which are only now esteemed. The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.

No ones serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.

Faith assuages guides restores.

Never admit defeat!

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.