Top 15 Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.

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

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

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.

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.

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

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.

There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

La chair, hélas, est triste, et j'ai lu tous les livres.

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!

I go to see the shadow you have become.