Gaston Bachelard Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

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

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

Gaston Bachelard
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaston Bachelard
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.

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

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

Gaston Bachelard
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.

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

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.

Gaston Bachelard
A young or tragic novelty - always sudden - never ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of time.

Gaston Bachelard
From the standpoint of life itself, we must therefore attempt to understand the past through the present, which is far different from striving ceaselessly to explain the present through the past. Eventually, no doubt, the feeling of duration must be elucidated. But for the time being let us simply take it as a fact: duration is a sensation like any other, as complex, as any other.

Gaston Bachelard
The laboratory technician has succeeded in implementing by means of the atomic pile the Einsteinian principle of inertia of energy.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard