Gaston Bachelard Quotes
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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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It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
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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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We must listen to poets.
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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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The words of the world want to make sentences.
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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 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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Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
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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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To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
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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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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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Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest
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When the image is new, the world is new.
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The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
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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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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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The blank page gives us the right to dream.
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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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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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Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.