Happiness Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud writes like someone trying to burn down the entire moral architecture of his century using a match and a grin. “All beings are fated to happiness” sounds, at first blush, like optimism. It’s not. In Rimbaud’s mouth, fate is a trapdoor: if happiness is guaranteed, then striving becomes theater, and the bourgeois cult of effort collapses into farce. He’s mocking the sanctimony of “becoming a better person” by suggesting the destination is fixed, so the journey is just friction.

The provocation sharpens with “action is not life.” This isn’t laziness; it’s an attack on the 19th-century equation of virtue with productivity, duty, and visible accomplishment. Action, he claims, is “wasting some force,” a draining expenditure that dulls perception. The word “enervation” gives away the real agenda: Rimbaud is defending intensity, sensation, and inner transformation against a world that rewards compliance. Life isn’t what you do; it’s what you can see, feel, metabolize into language.

“Morality is the weakness of the brain” is the line that makes his intent unmistakable. He’s not politely critiquing ethics; he’s diagnosing morality as a mental crutch, a way the mind protects itself from the destabilizing freedom of experience. In context, this fits the adolescent insurgent who wanted a “derangement of all the senses,” who treated respectability as a kind of anesthesia. The subtext is ruthless: society calls its fears “principles,” then congratulates itself for restraint. Rimbaud refuses the compliment and calls it what he thinks it is: neurological surrender.