Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes

You made the sobbing white of lilies too,
tumbling lightly across a sea of sighs on
their dreamy way to weeping moonlight through
the azure incense of the pale horizon!

Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change

In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.

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

To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.

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

Mon rêve montera vers toi: telle déjà,
Rare limpidité d'un coeur qui le songea,
Je me crois seule en ma monotone patrie
Et tout, autour de moi, vit dans l'idolâtrie
D'un miroir qui reflète en son calme dormant
Hérodiade au clair regard de diamant...

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

L'infinit sort du hasard, que vous avez nié.

When the sad sun sinks, It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks! No sunset, but the red awakening Of the last day concluding everything Struggles so sadly that time disappears, The redness of apocalypse, whose tears Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

WHEN SHADOW THREATENED WITH THE FATAL LAW…” When shadow threatened with the fatal law One old Dream, desire and pain of my spine, Grieved at perishing beneath ceilings funereal, It folded its indubitable wing within me. Luxury, O ebony room where, to charm a king, Celebrated garlands writhe in their death, You are but a proud lie spoken by darkness In the eyes of the lone man dazzled by his faith. Yes, I know that, far in deep night, the Earth Casts with great brilliance the strange mystery Under the hideous centuries that darken it less. Space ever alike if it grow or deny itself Rolls in that boredom vile fires as witnesses That genius has been lit with a festive star.

Un livre ne commence ni ne finit: tout au plus fait-il semblant.

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.

L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l'initiative aux mots.

We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.