Gaston Bachelard Quotes
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
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.
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak... It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
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.
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.
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
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.
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!
The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
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.
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.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
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.