Daily Inspiration Quote by Guillaume Apollinaire

To call the artist “inhuman” isn’t a slur in Apollinaire’s mouth; it’s a dare. He’s writing from the early 20th-century blast zone where the old humanist ideal - coherent self, stable morals, art as tasteful mirror - is getting shredded by modernity. Cubism fractures perspective, Futurism worships speed, the machine becomes a rival imagination. In that context, “become inhuman” reads less like misanthropy than a bid to escape the soft prison of ordinary feeling and inherited common sense.

The phrase works because it reverses a familiar compliment. We tend to praise art for its “humanity,” its empathy, its relatable truth. Apollinaire implies the opposite: the artist’s job is to exceed the human scale, to cultivate an almost alien perception. “Above all” makes it a primary drive, not an occasional side effect. Art isn’t just self-expression; it’s self-violation - a disciplined effort to unlearn the natural reflexes of sentiment, narrative, and realism.

There’s also a premonition here, and it’s uneasy. Apollinaire lived through World War I and was literally wounded by it. “Inhuman” can mean the exhilarating new viewpoint, but it also carries the era’s darker lesson: modern life manufactures impersonality, mass death, and mechanized distance. The artist, in Apollinaire’s paradox, wants both to harness that cold new power and to control it - to turn dehumanizing forces into form, style, and revelation rather than surrendering to them.