The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those...

Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it.” Here we...

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories...

Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams...

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Childhood is a human water, a water which comes out of the shadows. This childhood in the mists and glimmers, this life in the slowness of limbo gives us a certain layer of births. What...

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream...

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

We must listen to poets.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain...

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Here is Menard’s own intimate forest: ‘Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade…I live in great density…Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage…In the forest,...

The words of the world want to make sentences.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past...

Man is an imagining being.

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would...

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens...

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home....

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at...

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

What benefits new books bring us! I would like a basket full of books telling the youth of images which fall from heaven for me every day. This desire is natural. This prodigy is easy....

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

When the image is new, the world is new.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. . . . Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event

There is no original truth, only original error.

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give...

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to...

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in “foreign commerce” on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are...

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.