Quotes About Imagination

But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature. Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I naturalize the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: That's my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree. This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

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

And when a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet like Milosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Language dreams.

We cover the Universe with the drawings we have lived.

The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language.

recalling Bachelard's comment on poetic time in The Poetics of Reverie: "In reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destiny has not been able to make use of.

Nous souffrons par les rêves. Nous guérissons par les rêves.

The imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth of imagined being that I should like to explore.

De um modo geral, os 'fatos' não explicam os 'valores'. Bas obras de imaginação poética, os valores têm tal signo de novidade que tudo o que deriva do passado é inerte com relação a eles. Toda memória precisa ser reimaginada. Temos na memória microfilmes que só podem ser lidos quando recebem a luz viva da imaginação.

Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.

Well-determined centers of revery are means of communication between men who dream as surely as well-defined concepts are means of communications between men who think.

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice-look for its adjective.

Un rêve qui ne change pas les dimensions du monde est-il vraiment un rêve ?

L'imagination n'est pas, comme le suggère l'étymologie, la faculté de former des images de la réalité ; elle est la faculté de former des images qui dépassent la réalité, qui chantent la réalité. Elle est une faculté de surhumanité.

Le paradis, à n'en pas douter, n'est qu'une immense bibliothèque.

La poésie n'est pas une tradition, c'est un rêve primitif, c'est l'éveil des images premières.

L'imagination est une force première. Elle doit naître dans la solitude de l'être imaginant.