Top 100 Gaston Bachelard Quotes
#1. It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.
Gaston Bachelard
#2. The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
Gaston Bachelard
#3. The lock doesn't exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.
Gaston Bachelard
#5. If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
Gaston Bachelard
#6. Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!
Gaston Bachelard
#7. Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.
Gaston Bachelard
#8. The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
Gaston Bachelard
#9. It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.
Gaston Bachelard
#10. Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston Bachelard
#13. Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard
#14. Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
Gaston Bachelard
#15. The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.
Gaston Bachelard
#17. Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
Gaston Bachelard
#18. 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
#19. By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
#20. 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
#21. By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology."
Gaston Bachelard
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Gaston Bachelard
#25. Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?
Gaston Bachelard
#26. In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.
Gaston Bachelard
#27. Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.
Gaston Bachelard
#28. For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
Gaston Bachelard
#30. So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard
#31. To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Gaston Bachelard
#32. 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
#33. How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
Gaston Bachelard
#34. One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
Gaston Bachelard
#35. There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!
Gaston Bachelard
#36. In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?
Gaston Bachelard
#37. Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy ... aerial joy is freedom.
Gaston Bachelard
#38. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
Gaston Bachelard
#39. All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
Gaston Bachelard
#40. All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.
Gaston Bachelard
#41. The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
Gaston Bachelard
#42. The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
#43. The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.
Gaston Bachelard
#44. Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.
Gaston Bachelard
#45. What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?
Gaston Bachelard
#46. Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.
Gaston Bachelard
#48. Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
Gaston Bachelard
#49. The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
Gaston Bachelard
#50. For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being.
Gaston Bachelard
#51. The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light.
Gaston Bachelard
#52. The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche
Gaston Bachelard
#53. Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
Gaston Bachelard
#54. I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
Gaston Bachelard
#55. Poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard
#56. Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
Gaston Bachelard
#57. The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
Gaston Bachelard
#58. In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
Gaston Bachelard
#59. 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
#60. At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.
Gaston Bachelard
#61. The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
Gaston Bachelard
#63. 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
#64. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.
Gaston Bachelard
#65. Well-determined centers of revery are means of communication between men who dream as surely as well-defined concepts are means of communications between men who think.
Gaston Bachelard
#66. The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
Gaston Bachelard
#67. All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
Gaston Bachelard
#68. 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
#69. One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
Gaston Bachelard
#70. Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.
Gaston Bachelard
#71. But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.
Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.
Gaston Bachelard
#73. Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
Gaston Bachelard
#74. A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.
Gaston Bachelard
#75. Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.
Gaston Bachelard
#76. Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
Gaston Bachelard
#77. Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!
Gaston Bachelard
#78. The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
Gaston Bachelard
#79. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
Gaston Bachelard
#80. The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
Gaston Bachelard
#81. Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.
Gaston Bachelard
#82. The poetic image [ ... ] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.
Gaston Bachelard
#83. The geometry of a peacock's tail is more aerial: The eyes in a peacock's spread tail are situated at the intersecting point of a double cluster of spirals, that are apparently Archimedean spirals.
Gaston Bachelard
#84. What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak ... it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.
Gaston Bachelard
#85. A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
#86. 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
#87. The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language.
Gaston Bachelard
#88. Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston Bachelard
#90. Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!
Gaston Bachelard
#91. 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
#92. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream
Gaston Bachelard
#93. Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Gaston Bachelard
#94. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
Gaston Bachelard
#95. Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest
Gaston Bachelard
#96. In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.
Gaston Bachelard
#97. Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
Gaston Bachelard
#98. A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
Gaston Bachelard
#99. It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.
Gaston Bachelard
#100. The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.
Gaston Bachelard
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