Top quotes by Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls. Votes: 21

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. Votes: 20

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. Votes: 19

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. Votes: 17

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul. Votes: 12

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. Votes: 9

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth. Votes: 9

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know. Votes: 8

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased. Votes: 7

By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology." Votes: 7

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. Votes: 6

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event. Votes: 6

Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls. Votes: 6

Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold. Votes: 6

The blank page gives us the right to dream. Votes: 6

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it. Votes: 5

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid. Votes: 5

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Votes: 4

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. Votes: 4

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies. Votes: 4

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer. Votes: 3

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. Votes: 3

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams. Votes: 2

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need. Votes: 2

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry. Votes: 2

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. Votes: 2

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being. Votes: 2

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities. Votes: 1

Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire! Votes: 0

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written. Votes: 0

Man is an imagining being. Votes: 0

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth. Votes: 0

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service. Votes: 0

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life. Votes: 0

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. Votes: 0

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition. Votes: 0

A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy. Votes: 0

A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose. Votes: 0

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom. Votes: 0

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Votes: 0

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem. Votes: 0

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison. Votes: 0

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation. Votes: 0

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation. Votes: 0

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams. Votes: 0

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos. Votes: 0

Childhood lasts all through life. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state. Votes: 0

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. Votes: 0

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green. Votes: 0

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject. Votes: 0

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house. Votes: 0

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? Votes: 0

Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls! Votes: 0

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach. Votes: 0

Here we are at the very core of the thesis we wish to defend in the present essay: reverie is under the sign of the anima. When the reverie is truly profound, the being who comes to dream within us is our anima. For a philosopher who takes his inspiration from phenomenology, a reverie on reverie is very exactly a phenomenology of the anima, and it is by coordinating reveries on reverie that he hopes to constitute a "Poetics of reverie". In other words, the poetics of reverie is a poetics of the anima. Votes: 0

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes. Votes: 0

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company. Votes: 0

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... Votes: 0

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers. Votes: 0

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves? Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. Votes: 0

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I. Votes: 0

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word. Votes: 0

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? Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced. Votes: 0

Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares. Votes: 0

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists. Votes: 0

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us. Votes: 0

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. Votes: 0

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. Votes: 0

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer. Votes: 0

Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him. Votes: 0

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration. Votes: 0

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives. Votes: 0

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. Votes: 0

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort. Votes: 0

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in. Votes: 0

Our house is our corner of the world. Votes: 0

Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life. Votes: 0

Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest Votes: 0

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms. Votes: 0

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter." Votes: 0

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. Votes: 0

The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves as a reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn't reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is considered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal useful irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self. Votes: 0

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude. Votes: 0

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace Votes: 0

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites. Votes: 0

The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately. Votes: 0

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer. Votes: 0

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst. Votes: 0

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie. Votes: 0

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The poetic image exists apart from causality. Votes: 0

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche Votes: 0

The reflected world is the conquest of calm Votes: 0

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place. Votes: 0

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness. Votes: 0

The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving. Votes: 0

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality. Votes: 0

The words of the world want to make sentences. Votes: 0

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom! Votes: 0

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes. Votes: 0

There is no original truth, only original error. Votes: 0

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language. Votes: 0

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water. Votes: 0

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful... Votes: 0

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience. Votes: 0

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. Votes: 0

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection Votes: 0

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. Votes: 0

We must listen to poets. Votes: 0

We understand nature by resisting it. Votes: 0

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns? Votes: 0

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. Votes: 0

When the image is new, the world is new. Votes: 0

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... Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception? Votes: 0

Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word! Votes: 0

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization. Votes: 0

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream Votes: 0

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath. Votes: 0