50 Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Gaston Bachelard quotes

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

2. To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

3. 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.

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

5. The reflected world is the conquest of calm

6. 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.

7. Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

8. The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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

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

11. 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.

12. I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

13. Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

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

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

16. 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.

17. Man is an imagining being.

18. The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

20. There is no original truth, only original error.

21. 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.

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

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

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

25. 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.

26. Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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

28. The world is intense before becoming complex.

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

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

3. The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.

4. If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

5. In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.

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

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

8. Here we are at the very core of the thesis we wish to defend in the present essay: reverie is under the sign of the anima. When the reverie is truly profound, the being who comes to dream within us is our anima. For a philosopher who takes his inspiration from phenomenology, a reverie on reverie is very exactly a phenomenology of the anima, and it is by coordinating reveries on reverie that he hopes to constitute a "Poetics of reverie". In other words, the poetics of reverie is a poetics of the anima.

9. There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!

10. In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.

11. Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.

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

13. For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

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

15. In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?

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

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

18. We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

19. An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

20. In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

21. Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

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