Paul Verlaine Quotes
Best 33 Quotes by Paul Verlaine – Page 1 of 2
“A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.”
“A vast black sleep
falls over my life
sleep, all hope
sleep, all desire.”
“An infinite
Resignedness
Rains where the white
Mists opalesce
In the moon-shower...”
“Ce fut le temps sous de clairs ciels,
(Vous en souvenez-vous, Madame?)
De baisers superficiels
Et des sentiments à fleur d'âme.
It was a time of cloudless skies,
(My lady, do you recall?)
Of kisses that brushed the surface
And feelings that shook the soul.”
“Does your heart still throb at my very name?
Do you still see my soul in your dreams?”
“He is crying in my heart
As it rains over the town.”
“I am the empire at the end of decadence.”
“I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.”
“I have the excitement and I have the terror of being chosen.”
“I have the fury to love. My heart so weak is mad. What to do there? Oh, let it be!”
“I like the word ‘decadent,’ all shimmering with purple and gold. It throws out the brilliance of flames and the gleam of precious stones. It is made up of carnal spirit and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of the Lower Empire; it conjures up the paint of the courtesans, the sports of the circus, the breath of the tamers of animals, the bounding of wild beasts, the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets. The decadence is Sardanapalus lighting the fire in the midst of his women, it is Seneca declaiming poetry as he opens his veins, it is Petronius masking his agony with flowers.”
“Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.”
“London, black as crows and noisy as ducks, prudish with all the vices in evidence, everlastingly drunk, in spite of ridiculous laws about drunkenness, immense, though it is really basically only a collection of scandal-mongering boroughs, vying with each other, ugly and dull, without any monuments except interminable docks.”
“Music above all else.”
“Of its persistent, artless strain: Naught so can soothe a soul's own pain, As making glad another soul!”
“Take eloquence and break its neck!”
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“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
“The hour of infused tea and closed books; the sweetness of feeling the evening’s end.”
“The poet is a madman lost in adventure.”
“The rosy hearth, the lamplight's narrow beam,
The meditation that is rather dream,
With looks that lose themselves in cherished looks;
The hour of steaming tea and banished books;
The sweetness of the evening at an end,
The dear fatigue, and right to rest attained,
And worshipped expectation of the night,—
Oh, all these things, in unrelenting flight,
My dream pursues through all the vain delays,
Impatient of the weeks, mad at the days!”
“The rosy hearth, the lamplight's narrow beam, The meditation that is rather dream, With looks that lose themselves in cherished looks; The hour of steaming tea and banished books; The sweetness of the evening at an end, The dear fatigue, and right to rest attained, And worshipped expectation of the night,— Oh, all these things, in unrelenting flight, My dream pursues through all the vain delays, Impatient of the weeks, mad at the days!”
“Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck.”
“What we need, we, is fixedness intense, Unequalled effort, strife that shall not cease,”
“When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long
Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours toll deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over,
And I weep.
And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.”
Clair de Lune Quotes
“They do not seem to believe in their good fortune,
And their song mingles with the moonlight.”
Confessions Quotes
“It is the return of a dog to his vomit.”
“Rumour has a hundred mouths.”
Fêtes Galantes Quotes
“Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masked and costumed figures go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.
All sing in a minor key
Of all-conquering love and careless fortune
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight.
The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Which gives the birds to dream in the trees
And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy,
The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.”
Forty Poems Quotes
“Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust,
Your childhood is a bower:
Let my fingers wander in the moss
Where glows the rosebud
Let me among the clean grasses
Drink the drops of dew
Which sprinkle the tender flower”
Poems Under Saturn Quotes
“My soul sets sail for dreadful shipwrecks.”
“Night. Rain. A livid sky pierces the lacework
Of spires and towers, the silhouette of a Gothic
Town dim in the gray distance.”
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“If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.”
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