Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

A teenager-poet with a talent for combustion, Rimbaud turns existence into bad theater and hands each of us a mask. Calling life a farce isn’t just world-weariness; it’s an accusation about the scripts we inherit and the roles we’re coerced into playing. “Has to perform” is the knife twist: this isn’t a choice to be theatrical, it’s conscription. The line implies that authenticity is less a state of being than a logistical problem, constantly sabotaged by social necessity.

Rimbaud’s genius is how he compresses a whole modern psychology into one staging note. Farce is comedy built on misrecognition, exaggerated gesture, and the panic of keeping up appearances. If life is that genre, then we’re not tragic heroes shaping destiny; we’re frantic actors trying not to drop the prop. The subtext is that society rewards performance over truth, and that “selfhood” is often a set of cues learned for survival: manners, work, desire, even rebellion.

Context matters: Rimbaud wrote in the aftermath of a France rattled by upheaval, and he himself lived like a walking strike against bourgeois respectability, producing visionary work early and then abruptly quitting literature. That biographical fact makes the quote feel less like a mope and more like a verdict. If the stage is rigged, his response wasn’t to perfect the act; it was to walk offstage entirely, refusing the encore.