Top 140 Gaston Bachelard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Childhood lasts all through life.”

— Gaston Bachelard

5. “The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.”

— Gaston Bachelard

6. “The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

— Gaston Bachelard

7. “The blank page gives us the right to dream.”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

9. “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

10. “He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.”

— Gaston Bachelard

11. “A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.”

— Gaston Bachelard

12. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

13. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

— Gaston Bachelard

14. “It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

— Gaston Bachelard

15. “The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.”

— Gaston Bachelard

16. “All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.”

— Gaston Bachelard

17. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

22. “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

23. “The reflected world is the conquest of calm.”

— Gaston Bachelard

24. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

25. “Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.”

— Gaston Bachelard

26. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

27. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

28. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

29. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

30. “How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

— Gaston Bachelard

31. “A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.”

— Gaston Bachelard

32. “We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us.”

— Gaston Bachelard

33. “There is no original truth, only original error.”

— Gaston Bachelard

34. “The poetic image exists apart from causality.”

— Gaston Bachelard

35. “How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!”

— Gaston Bachelard

36. “The imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth of imagined being that I should like to explore.”

— Gaston Bachelard

37. “One doesn’t read poetry while thinking of other things.”

— Gaston Bachelard

38. “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

39. “Our house is our corner of the world.”

— Gaston Bachelard

40. “The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.”

— Gaston Bachelard

41. “Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.”

— Gaston Bachelard

42. “Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!”

— Gaston Bachelard

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

43. “Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.”

— Gaston Bachelard

44. “We understand nature by resisting it.”

— Gaston Bachelard

45. “When the image is new, the world is new.”

— Gaston Bachelard

46. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

47. “The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

49. “Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

— Gaston Bachelard

50. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard