We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

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?