Comte de Lautreamont quotes

Comte de Lautréamont was a French poet whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, celebrated for his enigmatic and influential work, "Les Chants de Maldoror." His writing anticipated many of the themes and styles that would later appear in surrealism. He remains a cult figure in modern literature, revered for his dark imagination and avant-garde vision. Here are 19 of his quotes:

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

Comte de Lautreamont

Farewell until eternity, where you and I shall not find ourselves together.

Comte de Lautreamont

Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! Luminous triangle! Whoever has not known you is without sense!

Comte de Lautreamont

Sleep is a reward for some, a punishment for others. For all, it is a sanction.

Comte de Lautreamont

As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

Comte de Lautreamont

Although according to certain philosophers it is quite difficult to distinguish the jester from the melancholic, life itself being a comic drama or a dramatic comedy.

Comte de Lautreamont

It is a power stronger than will. Could a stone escape from the laws of gravity? Impossible. Impossible, for evil to form an alliance with good.

Comte de Lautreamont

The great universal family of men is a utopia worthy of the most mediocre logic.

Comte de Lautreamont

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all times. I educate myself proportionately to my captured thought. I aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.

Comte de Lautreamont

Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.

Comte de Lautreamont

I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty.

Comte de Lautreamont

There are those whose purpose in writing is, by means of the noble qualities of heart which their imagination invents or which they themselves may have, to seek the plaudits of other human beings. For my part, I use my genius to depict the delights of cruelty: delights which are not transitory or artificial; but which began with man and will end with him. Cannot genius be allied with cruelty in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or can one, being cruel, not have genius?

Comte de Lautreamont

God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar.

Comte de Lautreamont

I hail you, old ocean! Old ocean, you are the symbol of identity: always equal unto yourself. In essence, you never change, and if somewhere your waves are enraged, farther off in some other zone they are in the most complete calm. You are not like man - who stops in the street to see two bulldogs seize each other by the scruff of the neck, but does not stop when a funeral passes. Man who in the morning is affable and in the evening ill-humoured. Who laughs today and weeps tomorrow. I hail you, old ocean!

Comte de Lautreamont

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

Comte de Lautreamont

Throughout the centuries, man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride; that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself; for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn?

Comte de Lautreamont

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all the other qualities. It is the nec plus ultra of the intelligence. Through this alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties.

Comte de Lautreamont