Gaston Bachelard - Life Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

View all 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.

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
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 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
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
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
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