“Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?”

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

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.

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.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

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.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

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

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

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.

Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!

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

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

There is no original truth, only original error.

Childhood lasts all through life.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Organized perception is what art is all about.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

I came here with the perfect chemist’s perception. The formula they had was perfect and any added ingredient could make it go bad or worse.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people’s entry into the main current of world-events.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.