Gaston Bachelard Quotes (23 Quotes)

There is no original truth, only original error.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

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.

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.

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

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 pr.

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.

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

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man is an imagining being.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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