Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.

Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.