“Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.”

One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

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

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.

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.

Joy increases as you give it, and diminishes as you try to keep it for yourself.

God loves us beyond comprehension, and we cannot diminish God’s love for us.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

He is living on a diminishing hope that good things await him in the future. A hope that promises a sense of contentment even though the scars from the past might never fade away.

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, – will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, – or to diminish something of their pains.

The funny thing about love is that it must continually grow or it will diminish.

For today’s generation of blacks to act as if their struggle compares to that of two generations ago insults and diminishes that generation’s struggle.