Gaston Bachelard Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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
The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

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

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

Gaston Bachelard
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.

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

Gaston Bachelard