Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes

How, save through obscure Terrors, imagine more implacable still And as a suppliant the god who some day will Receive the gift of your grace! and for whom, Devoured by anguish, do you keep the unknown Splendor and mystery of your being?

Away with those perfumes that do me harm! I hate them, nurse, and would you have me feel Their drunken vapors make my senses reel?

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?

Are you a living princess or her shadow? Let me kiss your fingers and their rings, and bid you Walk no longer in an unknown age...

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!

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

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

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

The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.

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

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

L'acte poétique consiste à voir soudain qu'une idée se fractionne en un nombre de motifs égaux par valeur et à les grouper; ils riment.

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

Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.

O Spirit of litigation, know, When we keep silent in this season, The stem of multiple lilies grew Too large to be contained by reason