110+ Gaston Bachelard Quotes (Philosophical, Poetic And Imagination)

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher, literary theorist, and poet. He is best known for his works on the philosophy of science and the philosophy of imagination. He is renowned for his phenomenological approach to the study of imagination and creativity, emphasizing the importance of subjective experience in understanding the world.

Top 10 Gaston Bachelard Quotes

1. 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.
2. One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
3. Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
4. Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
5. 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.
6. Our house is our corner of the world.
7. 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.
8. Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
9. The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace
10. 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 Short Quotes

• So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
• The blank page gives us the right to dream.
• Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
• The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
• Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!
• A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
• The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
• There is no original truth, only original error.
• The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.
• The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Gaston Bachelard Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — 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 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

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

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

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

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

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies. — Gaston Bachelard

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

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality. — Gaston Bachelard

Childhood lasts all through life. — 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

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject. — 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

Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie. — Gaston Bachelard

Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life. — Gaston Bachelard

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make. — Gaston Bachelard

We understand nature by resisting it. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The words of the world want to make sentences. — Gaston Bachelard

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies. — Gaston Bachelard

Man is an imagining being. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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

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

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience. — Gaston Bachelard

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company. — Gaston Bachelard

When the image is new, the world is new. — Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche — Gaston Bachelard

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization. — Gaston Bachelard

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams. — Gaston Bachelard

We must listen to poets. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life. — Gaston Bachelard

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter." — Gaston Bachelard

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. — Gaston Bachelard

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer. — Gaston Bachelard

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold. — 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

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves? — Gaston Bachelard

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

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed. — Gaston Bachelard

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The reflected world is the conquest of calm. — Gaston Bachelard

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

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced. — Gaston Bachelard

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. — Gaston Bachelard

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. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Life Lessons by Gaston Bachelard

1. Gaston Bachelard believed that imagination and creativity are essential for personal growth and development. He encouraged people to explore their inner worlds and to use their imaginations to create meaningful experiences.
2. He also emphasized the importance of understanding the power of emotions, and encouraged people to embrace their feelings and use them to gain insight into their lives.
3. He argued that the ability to dream and to think deeply is essential for living a meaningful life, and that it is important to take time to reflect and to appreciate the beauty of life.