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

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

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."

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.

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!

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.

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.