Gaston Bachelard Quotes

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

A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose.

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

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.

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

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.

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.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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

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

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

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.

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.

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!

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection

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

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.

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.

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.

Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls.

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

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

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

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.

By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology."

A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

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

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.

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

Man is an imagining being.

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

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.

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

The poetic image exists apart from causality.