Mallarme Quotes

#1. The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Stephane Mallarme

#2. Paintings are painted with paint, not with ideas.

Stephane Mallarme

#3. 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!

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#7. 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.

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#9. All thoughts emit a throw of dice

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#11. Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [ ... ] of all rhythms. But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse.

Stephane Mallarme

#12. For we are always at one with the instrument of our magic spells.

Stephane Mallarme

#13. 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.

Stephane Mallarme

#14. 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.

Stephane Mallarme

#15. You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Stephane Mallarme

#16. exiled spirits, red
as the spotless toe of a seraph spread
with scarlet by the shame of rumpled dawns

Stephane Mallarme

#17. The world exists to end up in a book.

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#19. Paint, not the thing but the effect which it produces.

Stephane Mallarme

#20. The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth.

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#22. The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#24. Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

Stephane Mallarme

#25. O naked flower of my lips, you lie! I await a thing unknown or perhaps, unaware of the mystery and your cries you give, O lips, the supreme tortured moans of a childhood groping among its reveries to sort out finally its cold precious stones.

Stephane Mallarme

#26. Dreams have as much influences as actions.

Stephane Mallarme

#27. A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.

Stephane Mallarme

#28. I can see my reflection like that of an angel!
And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium
Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,
Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land
Where beauty flourishes.

Stephane Mallarme

#29. Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

Stephane Mallarme

#30. Dreams have as much influence as actions.

Stephane Mallarme

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

Stephane Mallarme

#32. I go to see the shadow you have become.

Stephane Mallarme