Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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The poetic image exists apart from causality.
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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 reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
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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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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.
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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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Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
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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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To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
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We must listen to poets.
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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.
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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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Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest
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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.
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One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
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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.
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In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?
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Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.
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Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
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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.
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The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
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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.
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It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.
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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...