Top 142 Quotes & Sayings by Gaston Bachelard

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

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

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

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.

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

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.

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

There is no original truth, only original error.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

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

Man is an imagining being.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

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

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

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

The words of the world want to make sentences.

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.

The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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.

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.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace

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.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

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

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

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.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.

Childhood lasts all through life.

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.

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

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.

When the image is new, the world is new.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

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.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Our house is our corner of the world.

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.

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

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.

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

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.

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.