Louis Aragon Quotes

Geniuses are like ocean liners: they should never meet.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

Most people have never known solitude ... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

Yes, I have forgotten your eyes so much so that seeing them again leaves me indifferent on that point. Indifferent... oh no, words no more express love than they do the death of love.

Language was not given to man: he seized it.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.

It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work.

The carnal contact side by side, from heel to armpit, brings shudders that shake up nature like the flights of nocturnal birds.

I shall always rebel against any attempt to reduce a human being to a kind of mannequin, whose deeds and questions would be comprehensible like the deeds and gestures of monarchs recorded day after day in official communiques. Six months of a life cannot catalogue the vitality, the activity of an individual; only death stops development and then, what is important is the overall meaning of a life, not the details of that life, edifying to some, scandalous to others.

It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.

If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role.
I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.

No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

For each man there awaits ... a particular image capable of annihilating the entire universe.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book.

In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished.

No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence.

As [John Heartfield] was playing with the fire of appearance, reality took fire around him ... The scraps of photographs that he formerly manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupification, under his fingers began to signify.

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

Climb down into your idea, inhabit your idea, well-digger hanging from your rope. At first it was only an outline, a halo, and by now it has not got very far, and everywhere I touch upon things which are not that idea of yours, I touch that idea through everything that refutes it, the world expires along its shores. My idea, my idea clings to countless bonds. A long story and I am moved to pity by its scarred form, I kiss the imperfections of its foot.