Aging & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

Idle youth, enslaved to everything: Rimbaud turns the usual romantic myth of the young poet into an indictment. Youth is supposed to be freedom, appetite, possibility. He flips it. “Idle” isn’t restful; it’s a paralysis that leaves you vulnerable to every passing force - desire, boredom, ideology, other people’s expectations. The sting is in “enslaved to everything,” a phrase that refuses the comforting idea that bondage requires a single master. For Rimbaud, modern life’s tyranny is plural: sensations, distractions, impulses, the constant pressure to feel more and faster.

Then he lands the blade closer to home: “by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.” Sensitivity, in the 19th-century poetic imagination, is often treated as a gift, almost a moral credential. Rimbaud treats it like a vice. The subtext is self-accusation, but also a critique of the bohemian pose: feeling intensely can become an alibi for not acting, not building, not choosing. Sensitivity becomes consumption rather than perception - a way to be endlessly acted upon.

Context matters because Rimbaud is the prodigy who burned bright and then walked away, abandoning literature in his early twenties. Read against that biography, the line sounds like a postmortem delivered while still alive: he’s diagnosing the costs of living as pure receptivity. The quote works because it refuses consolation. It doesn’t romanticize suffering; it frames it as squandered agency, a young man watching his own talent dissolve into stimulus.