5 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Arthur Rimbaud wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Arthur Rimbaud published one book himself, Une saison en enfer, at nineteen, and stopped writing not long after. It is public domain, so every line here is checked against its complete text, with a plain prose rendering above the French.
The sentence most quoted as his does not appear in it, and is documented below.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
Genuinely Rimbaud's, but not from the book it is usually credited to. It comes from two letters he wrote in May 1871, to Georges Izambard and to Paul Demeny — the so-called Lettres du voyant — and does not appear anywhere in Une saison en enfer, where it is routinely placed.
Once, if I remember rightly, my life was a feast where every heart opened and every wine flowed. One evening I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I insulted her.Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient. Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l'ai trouvée amère.—Et je l'ai injuriée.
One must be absolutely modern.Il faut être absolument moderne.
Love must be reinvented, that much is clear.L'amour est à réinventer, on le sait.
It is found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea gone off with the sun.Elle est retrouvée! Quoi? l'éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil.
Life is the farce we all must play.La vie est la farce à mener par tous.
No. The phrase — “I is another,” his deliberate breaking of the grammar — comes from two letters of May 1871, to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny. It appears nowhere in Une saison en enfer, which is where it is usually attributed.
“One must be absolutely modern.” It comes from “Adieu,” the closing section of Une saison en enfer, written when Rimbaud was nineteen, and it became a rallying cry for avant-gardes he never lived to see.
Eighteen and nineteen. He published it himself in 1873, had largely stopped writing by twenty-one, and spent the rest of his short life trading in Africa.
The French is the poem. The English lines are plain prose renderings meant to carry the sense; no public-domain verse translation of these particular passages exists to quote, so the verified French is printed with them.
A short, violent prose sequence in which the narrator settles accounts with his own genius, his damnation, his lover, his language and his ambitions, and ends by resolving to be absolutely modern. It is the only book Rimbaud saw into print himself.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Arthur Rimbaud page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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