Gaston Bachelard quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Gaston Bachelard on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

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

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

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

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

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

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

Man is an imagining being.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.

Childhood lasts all through life.

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?

The poetic image exists apart from causality.

Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

There is no original truth, only original error.

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

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

The lock doesn't exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.

The reflected world is the conquest of calm

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

We understand nature by resisting it.

We cover the Universe with the drawings we have lived.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

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

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Our house is our corner of the world.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

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 only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.

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

Poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream

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!

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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

The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.

We must listen to poets.

Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.

When the image is new, the world is new.

The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.

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

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

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

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

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

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

We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us.

The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

What a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness! Oh, my roads and their cadence.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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.

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche

Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.

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

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

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.