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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.
Gaston Bachelard -
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.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard -
Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.
Gaston Bachelard -
Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.
Gaston Bachelard -
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.
Gaston Bachelard -
The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light.
Gaston Bachelard -
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
Gaston Bachelard
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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.
Gaston Bachelard -
Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest
Gaston Bachelard -
Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.
Gaston Bachelard -
In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.
Gaston Bachelard -
Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
Gaston Bachelard -
Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.
Gaston Bachelard
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Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.
Gaston Bachelard -
We must listen to poets.
Gaston Bachelard -
Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.
Gaston Bachelard -
It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.
Gaston Bachelard -
I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting...
Gaston Bachelard -
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
Gaston Bachelard
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Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!
Gaston Bachelard -
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard -
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
Gaston Bachelard -
The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.
Gaston Bachelard