Stephane Mallarme quotes:

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

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

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

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.

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

Paintings are painted with paint, not with ideas.

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

All thoughts emit a throw of dice

Dreams have as much influences as actions.

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.

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

Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

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

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.

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

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

Exiled spirits, redas the spotless toe of a seraph spreadwith scarlet by the shame of rumpled dawns

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.

As for me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because this self-lust has a delightful dying fall in my soul.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

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

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

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.

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

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

The world exists to end up in a book.

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

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.

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

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!

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