Gaston Bachelard's Quotes

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

There is no original truth, only original error.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Man is an imagining being.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.