Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
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Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
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Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
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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!
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If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
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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.
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For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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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.
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It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
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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.
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The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
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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.