Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

The words of the world want to make sentences.

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

There is no original truth, only original error.

— Gaston Bachelard

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

We must listen to poets.

— Gaston Bachelard

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, as we wrongly think, but that the imagination lives in the child.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

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.

— Gaston Bachelard

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard