Gaston Bachelard quotes

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

#Wise #Past #Connections

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

#Life #Children #Events

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

#Dream #Writing #Giving

When the image is new, the world is new.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Design #World

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

#Morning #Sleep #Night

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Men #Desire #Needs

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Dreamer #World #Bears

Our house is our corner of the world.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#House #World

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Moving #Space #Tree

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

#Soul #Mind #Vacuums

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

#Real #Expression #Emotion

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Beautiful #Reading #Mean

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!
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Dream #Inspire #Principles

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

#Childhood #Adults #World

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Integrity #Lying #Suffering

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

#Fire #Childhood #Forgotten

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

#Beauty #Communication #Writing

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

#Dream #Peace #Home

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Dream #Memories #Real

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

#Science #Knowing #Progress

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Dream #Home #Pride

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Life #Substance #Matter

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#House

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Space #Imagination #House

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Life #Dream #Passion

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.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Children #Son #Men

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Giving #Littles #Irony

There is no original truth, only original error.
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Mistake #Errors

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."
-- Gaston Bachelard

#Life #Tired #Heart