Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard Quotes
39 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The words of the world want to make sentences.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
Gaston Bachelard
1
2
Quote of the day
Dumbledore: It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
J. K. Rowling
Gaston Bachelard
Creative Commons
Born:
June 27, 1884
Died:
October 16, 1962
(aged 78)
Bio:
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break.
Known for:
The Poetics of Space (1958)
Psychoanalysis of Fire
Poetics of reverie
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Water and Dreams
Most used words:
life
,
house
,
language
,
word
,
man
,
tree
,
dream
,
live
,
poetry
,
childhood
,
written
,
poets
,
event
,
dreamer
,
earth
Gaston Bachelard on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Gaston Bachelard Quotes
Gaston Bachelard Short Quotes
French Philosopher Quotes
Philosopher Quotes
19th-century Philosopher Quotes
Related People
Michel Foucault
French Philosopher
Henri Bergson
French Philosopher
Martin Heidegger
German Philosopher
Karl Popper
Austrian Philosopher
Georges Canguilhem
French Philosopher
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes