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

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.

We must listen to poets.

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.

With Climate Change as a Security Risk, WBGU has compiled a flagship report on an issue that quite rightly is rising rapidly up the international political agenda.