A Quote by Gaston Bachelard

A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose.

Gaston Bachelard

Quote Topics

Accentuate Automatically Beautiful Becomes Begin Being Being Happy Contribute Destiny Dream Dreamed Dreamer Everything Gift Grandiose Had Happiness Happy He Man His Man Must Our Out Plays Poetic Repose Reverie Since Tell Then Turn Universe Wants Well Work World Would Would Be

Quote Author

Gaston Bachelard
French - Philosopher
June 27, 1884 - October 16, 1962

Here we are at the very core of the thesis we wish to defend in the present essay: reverie is under the sign of the anima. When the reverie is truly profound, the being who comes to dream within us is our anima. For a philosopher who takes his inspiration from phenomenology, a reverie on reverie is very exactly a phenomenology of the anima, and it is by coordinating reveries on reverie that he hopes to constitute a "Poetics of reverie". In other words, the poetics of reverie is a poetics of the anima.

Gaston Bachelard

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.

Gaston Bachelard

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

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.

Gaston Bachelard

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

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.

Antoine Rivarol

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.

Gaston Bachelard

The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves as a reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn't reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is considered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal useful irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self.

Gaston Bachelard

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

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.

Charles Baudelaire

I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose.

Newt Gingrich

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.

Anais Nin

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

Joseph Conrad

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

If I were a painter I would paint my reverie If that's the only way for you to be with me