Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.
In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.
Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.
What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?
The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.
It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.
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.
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.
A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?
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.
It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.
Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.
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.
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak... It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
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.
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.
To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.
Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.
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.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.
By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology."
It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.
There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!