Stephane Mallarme Quotes

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.

Paint, not the thing but the effect which it produces.

All thoughts emit a throw of dice

I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.

The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though "he was full of ideas." "My dear Degas," Mallarmé responded, "poems are not made out of ideas. They're made out of words.

The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.

From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:

Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;

The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!

And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!

Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!

Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.

I go to see the shadow you have become.

For we are always at one with the instrument of our magic spells.

I can see my reflection like that of an angel!
And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium
Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,
Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land
Where beauty flourishes.

exiled spirits, red
as the spotless toe of a seraph spread
with scarlet by the shame of rumpled dawns

A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it's enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.

The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.

It is in front of the the paper that the artist creates himself.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

The world exists to end up in a book.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty
and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth.