Top 90 Arthur Rimbaud Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What am I doing here?”

— Arthur Rimbaud

2. “True life is elsewhere.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

3. “The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

4. “A thousand Dreams within me softly burn.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

5. “Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

Featured in: Quotes About the Sea

6. “A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

7. “It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

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

— Arthur Rimbaud

9. “I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

10. “Unhappiness was my god.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

11. “Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

12. “I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

13. “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

14. “I is another.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

15. “My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?”

— Arthur Rimbaud

16. “I’m intact, and I don’t give a damn.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

17. “To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”

— Arthur Rimbaud

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

— Arthur Rimbaud

Featured in: Quotes About Childhood

19. “No one’s serious at seventeen.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

20. “What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

21. “I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

22. “Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

Featured in: Country Quotes

23. “I shed more tears than God could ever have required.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

24. “Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!”

— Arthur Rimbaud

25. “Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

26. “Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

27. “One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

28. “Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

29. “And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! – But the great Faith is Love!”

— Arthur Rimbaud

30. “Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

31. “Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”

— Arthur Rimbaud

32. “Morality is the weakness of the mind.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

33. “The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

34. “The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

35. “You will always be a hyena.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

36. “It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

37. “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

38. “As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

39. “Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!”

— Arthur Rimbaud

40. “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

41. “The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

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

— Arthur Rimbaud

43. “And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

44. “I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

45. “I could never throw Love out of the window.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

46. “But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

47. “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

48. “I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

49. “But the problem is to make the soul into a monster.”

— Arthur Rimbaud

50. “The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea.”

— Arthur Rimbaud