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

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.

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.

When the image is new, the world is new.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.

If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.

We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.