Paul Verlaine Quotes

• La musique avant toute chose.

  Paul Verlaine

  Practice

  Paul Verlaine (2013). “Jadis et naguère”, p.13, Presses Électroniques de France

  28 Copy quote

• The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

  Paul Verlaine

  Travel, Adventure, Poet

  33 Copy quote

• I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

  Paul Verlaine

  Empires, Ends, Decadence

  59 Copy quote

• Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches, and here is my heart which beats only for you.

  Paul Verlaine

  Love, Flower, Heart

  1874 Romances sans paroles, 'Aquarelles, Green'

  44 Copy quote

• Music before all else,
  and for that choose the irregular,
  which is vaguer and melts better into the air.

  Paul Verlaine

  Air, Music Is

  33 Copy quote

• I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.

  Paul Verlaine

  Spring, Army, Fire

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Verlaine

  Beautiful, Dream, Song

  27 Copy quote

• Tears fall in my heart
  As tears fall on the town.

  Paul Verlaine

  Rain, Fall, Heart

  "The Sky Above the Roof: Fifty-six Poems".

  34 Copy quote

• Take eloquence and wring its neck.

  Paul Verlaine

  Necks, Eloquence

  Paul Verlaine (1981). “Paul Verlaine, his absinthe-tinted song”, Ams Pr Inc

  21 Copy quote

• A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

  Paul Verlaine

  Mean, Poetry, Machines

  21 Copy quote

• A vast black sleep falls over my life sleep, all hope sleep, all desire.

  Paul Verlaine

  Fall, Sleep, Black

  13 Copy quote

• I like this word decadent; all shimmering and purple and gold.

  Paul Verlaine

  Purple, Gold

  10 Copy quote

• 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!

  Paul Verlaine

  Dream, Book, Night

  Paul Verlaine (1906). “Poems”

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Paul Verlaine

  Flower, June, Childhood

  Paul Verlaine (1948). “Forty Poems”

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Paul Verlaine

  Law, Ducks, Drunk

  16 Copy quote

• Prends l'e loquence et tords-lui son cou! Take eloquence and break its neck!

  Paul Verlaine

  Son, Necks, Break

  16 Copy quote

• A flat black bug, that is London.

  Paul Verlaine

  Black, London, Bugs

  Paul Verlaine (1962). “The Sky Above the Roof: Fifty-six Poems”

  8 Copy quote

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