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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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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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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For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
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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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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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The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
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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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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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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
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He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.
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There is no original truth, only original error.
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One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
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If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?