31 quotes
The flesh is sorrowful, alas! And I've read all the books.
It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.
If only I'd chosen an easy work!
The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.
The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.
We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.
A remark reported in Psychologie de l'art (1927)
A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.
Title of poem (1897)
Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul.
When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!
Hérodiade (1898)
As for me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because this self-lust has a delightful dying fall in my soul.
The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.
The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
Magical shadow with symbolic powers!
A voice from the distant past, an evocation,
Is it not mine prepared for incantation?
Hérodiade (1898)
In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.
All alone I gave
Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
Away with those perfumes that do me harm!
I hate them, nurse, and would you have me feel
Their drunken vapors make my senses reel?
Hérodiade (1898)
Are you a living princess or her shadow?
Let me kiss your fingers and their rings, and bid you
Walk no longer in an unknown age...
Hérodiade (1898)
O Spirit of litigation, know,
When we keep silent in this season,
The stem of multiple lilies grew
Too large to be contained by reason
Prose (1885)
My breast, though proofless, still attests a bite
Mysterious, due to some august tooth;
But enough! for confidant such mystery chose
The great double reed which one plays 'neath the blue.
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
Etna! 'tis amid you, visited by Venus
On your lava fields placing her candid feet,
When a sad stillness thunders wherein the flame dies.
I hold the queen!
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)