Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
Each time we try to express ourselves we have to break with ourselves.
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
Death is the mother of forms.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
Without democracy freedom is a chimera.
Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
Loving means getting rid of names.