Top 35 Guillaume Apollinaire Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Positivity Quotes, Happy Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Joy Quotes

2. “Joy came always after pain.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

3. “I don’t want to work. I want to smoke.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

4. “How slow life is, how violent hope is.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

5. “The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

6. “My dreaming thoughts go barefoot in the evening.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

7. “Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

8. “Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with formal elements borrowed not only from the reality of vision, but from that of conception.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

9. “One day One day I waited for myself I said to myself Guillaume it’s time you came So I could know just who I am I who know others.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

10. “When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

11. “Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

12. “When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

13. “Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

14. “I hate artists who are not of their time.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

15. “All the words I have to say have turned into stars.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

16. “Her eyes were dancing like those of angels.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

17. “Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

18. “Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

19. “Without artists, the sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

20. “The domain of the imagination is reality.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

21. “In this mirror, I am enclosed a live and real as you. Imagine angels and not like the reflections.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

22. “Color is the fruit of life.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

23. “It’s raining my soul, it’s raining, but it’s raining dead eyes.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

24. “I sing the joy of wandering and the pleasure of the wanderer’s death.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

25. “Paint with whatever material you please – with pipes, postage stamps, postcards or playing cards, painted paper, or newspapers.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

26. “My, how beautiful is war! its songs, its leisure!”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

27. “To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

28. “How slow life seems to me, how violent the hope of love can be.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

29. “Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

30. “I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

31. “People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

32. “Matisse renovates rather than innovates.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

33. “We cannot carry our father’s corpse with us everywhere we go.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

34. “My blue mask as a God puts on his sky.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

35. “My Autumn eternal O my spiritual season.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

36. “Even the automobiles have an air of antiquity here.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

37. “Oh my shadow. Oh my ancient serpent.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

38. “At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language’s deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire