“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.”

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

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.

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

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

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.

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

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.

Man is an imagining being.

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

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.

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Our house is our corner of the world.

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.