We understand nature by resisting it.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this “failing asleep”, the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.
The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the “exalted” substances.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?
An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
The poetic image exists apart from causality.
The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.
The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess 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.
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.
Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.
Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.