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
Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Knowledge
Faith assuages, guides, restores.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Faith, Belief
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Parents, Parenting
And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God!—But the great Faith is Love!
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: God
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
—Arthur Rimbaud
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees—And I found her bitter—And I reviled her.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Beauty
When you are seventeen you aren’t really serious.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Youth, Thrift
I is another.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Identity
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: Style, Taste
Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Life and Living
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, Expectation, Disillusion
I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Hell
Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Youth
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: Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Topics: Sorrow, Sadness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Charles Baudelaire French Poet
Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
Remy de Gourmont French Poet
Alphonse de Lamartine French Poet, Politician, Historian
Jean de La Fontaine French Poet
Guillaume Apollinaire Italian-born French Poet
Victor Hugo French Novelist
Marquis de Sade French Political leader
Michel Houellebecq French Author
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist