Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes

…Do I see the ghost of a princess?
Cease walking in some unknown era…

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

Magical shadow with symbolic powers! A voice from the distant past, an evocation, Is it not mine prepared for incantation?

I, proud of my rumour, for long I will talk Of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous, From their shades unloose yet more of their girdles: So when of grapes the clearness I've sucked, To banish regret by my ruse disavowed, Laughing, I lift the empty bunch to the sky, Blowing into its luminous skins and athirst To be drunk, till the evening I keep looking through. Oh nymphs, we diverse MEMORIES refill.

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.

«No fundo o mundo foi feito para acabar num belo livro.»

No more, I must sleep, forgetting the outrage, On the thirsty sand lying, and as I delight Open my mouth to wine's potent star! Adieu, both! I shall see the shade you became.

The writer must make himself, in the text, the spiritual actor either of his sufferings, those dragons he has nurtured, or of some happiness. Floor, lamp, clouding of cloths and melting of mirrors, real even down to the exaggerated jerking of our gauzy form around the virile stature stopped upon one foot; a Place comes forth, a stage, the public enhancement of the spectacle of Self; there, through the mediation of light, flesh, and laughter, the sacrifice of personality made by the inspirer is complete; or else in some foreign resurrection, he is finished: his word from then on, reverberating and useless, is exhaled by the orchestral chimera.

Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!

Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.

No fundo, o mundo foi feito para acabar num belo livro.

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

Did I love a dream?

« Un grand écrivain se remarque au nombre de pages qu'il ne publie pas. »

A kiss would kill me, woman, If beauty were not death... By what attraction Am I drawn, what morn forgotten by the prophets That pours on the dying distance its sad rites?