Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
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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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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.
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Man is an imagining being.
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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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The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.
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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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Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.
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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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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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Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
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The words of the world want to make sentences.
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It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
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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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So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
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The poetic image exists apart from causality.
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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.
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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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When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know...
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The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
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The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.
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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.
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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
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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.