Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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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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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.
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The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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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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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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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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We must listen to poets.
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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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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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Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.
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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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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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He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.
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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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The words of the world want to make sentences.
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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 poetic image exists apart from causality.
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The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.
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All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
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So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
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Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
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The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.