Arthur Rimbaud Quotes

Looking For Arthur Rimbaud Quotes? This 19th century french poet was the original enfant terrible whose writings inspired many future poets and artists.

This restless youth was credited as being a major influence by Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison to their own works.

Arthur Rimbaud 1854-1891

"A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.
Rimbaud

All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence's.
Rimbaud

Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed and the Supreme Scientist!" 
Rimbaud

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” 
Rimbaud

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
Rimbaud

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
Rimbaud



Verlaine: What is your greatest fear?
Rimbaud: That other people would see me as i see them.
Rimbaud

Eternity. Where the sun mingled with the sea.
Rimbaud

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complaisancy exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented.
Rimbaud

I understood that what I needed to become the first poet of this century is to experience everything in my body.
It's no longer enough for me to be one person, I decided to be everyone.
I decided to be a genius. I decided to originate the future.
Rimbaud




Rimbaud: I suppose you think I've been just lying here all these weeks in a state of paralyzed sloth

Verlaine: Well, not necessarily

Rimbaud: oh I have... but bubbling beneath the surface and rising slowly to the layers of indifferences comes a new system. Harden up, reject romanticism, abandon rhethoric, get it right. And finally I have seen where my attempt to conquer the world has led me.

Verlaine: Where has it led you?

Rimbaud: Here. My search for universal experience has led me here. To live an idle, pointless life of poverty, is the menial of a bald, ugly, aging, drunken lyric poet who clings to me because his wife won't take him back.

Verlaine: How can you bring yourself to say anything like that?

Rimbaud: It's easy, it's the truth.
Rimbaud



When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed,
when she lives for herself and through herself,
when man, up till now abominable, will have set her free,
she will be a poet as well!
Woman will discover the unknown!
Will her world of ideas differ from ours?
She will discover strange things,
unfathomable, repulsive, delightful;
we will accept and understand them?
Rimbaud

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