Gaston Bachelard Quotes
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
Gaston Bachelard
Quotes to Explore
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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
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The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
Gaston Bachelard
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Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Gaston Bachelard
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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!
Gaston Bachelard
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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
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The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
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One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard
