Inspirational Quotes by Arthur Rimbaud (French Poet)

Inspirational Quotations by Arthur Rimbaud (French Poet)

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91,) fully Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, was an anarchic French poet and adventurer. This “marvelous boy-poet of French literature” won prominence in the Symbolist movement and distinctly influenced modern poetry.

Born in Charleville, northeastern France, Rimbaud wrote his most famous poem, ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (1871,) at the age of 17 under the tutelage of the poet Paul Verlaine. Renowned for its verbal eccentricities, daring imagery, and evocative language, it was translated by Samuel Beckett as The Drunken Boat (1932.)

Rimbaud and Verlaine had a stormy relationship between 1871 and 1873. Verlaine shot and wounded Rimbaud during a drunken quarrel, and was imprisoned for attempted murder. Rimbaud published Une Saison enenfer (1873; A Season in Hell, 1939,) which established his reputation for hallucinatory verbal creation.

At the age of 19, Rimbaud gave up poetry in disappointment with the cold reception that Une Saison enenfer got from the literary critics. He burned all his manuscripts and traveled in Europe and North Africa as a soldier, trader, explorer, and gunrunner. He returned to Paris shortly before his death.

Meanwhile, in 1886, Verlaine published Rimbaud’s earlier collection of symbolist prose poems Les Illuminations (1971) as by the ‘late Arthur Rimbaud.’ They caused a sensation in France and built Rimbaud’s reputation, but he reacted with apathy when he learned about them.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Arthur Rimbaud

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees –And I found her bitter –And I reviled her.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Beauty

There is a woman who spent her life loving that evil creature: she died. I’m sure she’s a saint in heaven right now. You are going to kill me the way he killed that woman.That is what’s in store for all of us who have unselfish hearts.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Sacrifice

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Hell

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Morality, Disillusion, Expectation

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Life and Living

Never admit defeat.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Youth

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Knowledge

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Life and Living

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
—Arthur Rimbaud

When you are seventeen you aren’t really serious.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Youth, Thrift

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.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Taste, Style

I is another.
—Arthur Rimbaud

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Parents

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Sorrow

Faith assuages, guides, restores.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Faith, Belief

And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! — But the great Faith is Love!
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: God