Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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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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We must listen to poets.
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The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
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The words of the world want to make sentences.
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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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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.
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It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
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Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
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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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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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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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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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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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In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.
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When the image is new, the world is new.
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Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest
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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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The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
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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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The blank page gives us the right to dream.
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A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
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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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Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.