30 phrases by Arthur Rimbaud for those who are passionate about French poetry

Life is the farce that everyone has to perform.

Is it these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

What hearts will I break? What lie should I sustain? What blood to walk on?

Love needs to be reinvented, everyone knows.

The hand on the feather is the hand on the hoe.

I wrote silences, nights, I wrote down the inexpressible. It fixed vertigo.

A thousand dreams inside me burn softly.

Sentinel soul, murmur your prayer. At night so null and a day of fire.

Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

Nobody is serious at 17.

I received the coup de grace in my heart. Oh! I hadn’t foreseen it. I didn’t do any harm.

But I just noticed that my mind is asleep.

Genius is childhood recovery at ease.

Any man who destroys himself is doomed, is he not? I believe I’m in hell, therefore I am.

But the problem is to make a monster out of the soul.

Idle youth, enslaved by everything. Because I was too sensitive, I wasted my life.

But actually, I cried a lot! Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun is bitter.

The real life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Whatever unites families and couples, that’s not love. This is stupidity or selfishness or fear.

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

Come ever since, and you will go everywhere.

At dawn, armed with ardent patience, we will enter the splendid Cities.

I found that I could extinguish all human hope in my soul.

Unhappiness was my god.

Once, if I remember correctly, my life was a party where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

Now I’m an outcast. I hate my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I prefer to be silent.

It was the voice of the mad seas, roaring immensely, that shattered your infant breast, very soft, very human.

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.