Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.

The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.

Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods but a new metaphysics can rescue us.