Gaston Bachelard Quotes

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

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

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

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.

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

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

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

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

We understand nature by resisting it.

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

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

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.

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

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

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 poetic image exists apart from causality.

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.

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?

It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.

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

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

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!

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

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

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

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

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

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

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

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?

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection

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

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

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

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

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

Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

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

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.