Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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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.
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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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Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
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So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
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Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
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We must listen to poets.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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!
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He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.
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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.
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The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.
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Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.
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The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
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Our house is our corner of the world.
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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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Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
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It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
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The words of the world want to make sentences.
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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.