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

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

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.

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.

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.

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

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.

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing… And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

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

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.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

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

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

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.

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.

We understand nature by resisting it.

Once or twice I’ve been described as a light comedian. I consider this the most accurate description of my abilities I’ve ever seen.

When we have this description, of what a sketch is, itsattributes, we can then start inventing new things thatshare those attributes, and therefore improve our currenttechnics by inventing new and better tools that help ussketch.

Love is something so divine, Description would but make it less; ‘Tis what I feel, but can’t define, ‘Tis what I know but can’t express

I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.

I don’t see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.

Managers need to create what I call “customer pictures,” verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive.

I doubt whether I ever read any description of scenery which gave me an idea of the place described.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.