Gaston Bachelard Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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

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
A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

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

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
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.

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 mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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
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