To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Man is an imagining being.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

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

There is no original truth, only original error.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.

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

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary through the brilliance of any image the distant past resounds with echoes.

The metaphor is an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.