Arthur Rimbaud
Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!Collection: Watches
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.Collection: Keys
It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.Collection: Thinking
It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.Collection: Night
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?Collection: Men
And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!Collection: Love
Hay que ser absolutamente ModernoCollection: Hay
It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.Collection: Sea
For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.Collection: Love
O seasons, O castles, What soul is without flaws? All its lore is known to me, Felicity, it enchants us all.Collection: Soul
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.Collection: Funny
But the problem is to make the soul into a monsterCollection: Soul
...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!Collection: Spring
True life is elsewhereCollection: True Life
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?Collection: Lying
And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.Collection: Believe
...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.Collection: Running
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.Collection: Dream
Faith assuages, guides, restores.Collection: Guides
Morality is the weakness of the mind.Collection: Mind
The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.Collection: Long
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.Collection: Love
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the sensesCollection: Long
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.Collection: Farce
...as for me, I am intact; and I don't care.Collection: Care
Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?Collection: Lying
Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don't know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.Collection: Weakness
Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.Collection: Country
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.Collection: Religious
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.Collection: Tears
I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.Collection: Night
I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.Collection: May
...You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!Collection: Jobs
Then you'll feel your cheek scratched... A little kiss, like a crazy spider, Will run round your neck... And you'll say to me : "Find it !" bending your head - And we'll take a long time to find that creature - Which travels a lot.Collection: Running
He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.Collection: Disappointment
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?Collection: Chaos
What am I doing here?Collection: Travel
No one's serious at seventeen.Collection: Serious
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.Collection: Fowl