Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragonwas a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth3 October 1897
CountryFrance
crowd kinds love oblivious people
Love is made by two people in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd but in an oblivious crowd.
function furnish genius ideas twenty
The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.
meaningful black-and-white light
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
reason compare
Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?
friends people no-friends
I have no friends, there are only people I love.
stupidity police arms
No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.
photography squares illustration
Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity...
doors people solitude
Most people have never known solitude.... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.
blow sometimes pleasure
It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.
cities community loner
And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.
truth errors may
Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.
horse reading heart
Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.
pain reading hard-work
It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work.
summer spring heart
O months of blossoming, months of transfigurations, May without cloud and June stabbed to the heart, I shall not ever forget the lilacs or the roses Nor those the spring has kept folded away apart.