At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
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.
If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.
The words of the world want to make sentences.
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
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.
In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.
By following “the path of reverie”-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to “do phenomenology.”
One doesn’t read poetry while thinking of other things.
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!
Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.