“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.”

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?

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

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.

When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.

Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.

What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.

We got a lot of politicians up there on Capital Hill. Ain’t it funny how they prosper while the country stands still?

If what the heart approves conforms to proper patterns, then even if one’s desires are many, what harm would they be to good order?

Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, and that we are all one Life.

In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.

If we don’t give science its proper place in our national life. We shall no doubt be training all the bullfighters we need, because we don’t use many.