Top 140 Gaston Bachelard Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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!”

— Gaston Bachelard

52. “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

53. “Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?”

— Gaston Bachelard

54. “To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.”

— Gaston Bachelard

55. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

56. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

57. “One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.”

— Gaston Bachelard

58. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

59. “At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.”

— Gaston Bachelard

60. “For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”

— Gaston Bachelard

61. “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

62. “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

63. “The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.”

— Gaston Bachelard

64. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

65. “We must listen to poets.”

— Gaston Bachelard

66. “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

67. “To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...”

— Gaston Bachelard

68. “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

69. “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

— Gaston Bachelard

70. “To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.”

— Gaston Bachelard

71. “Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?”

— Gaston Bachelard

72. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

73. “What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?”

— Gaston Bachelard

74. “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immense is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.”

— Gaston Bachelard

75. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

76. “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

77. “We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.”

— Gaston Bachelard

78. “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.”

— Gaston Bachelard

79. “Well-determined centers of revery are means of communication between men who dream as surely as well-defined concepts are means of communications between men who think.”

— Gaston Bachelard

80. “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

81. “Every object in the world, loved for its own sake, has a right to its own nothingness. Every being pours out being, a little of its being, the shadow of its being, into its own non-being.”

— Gaston Bachelard

82. “And when a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet like Milosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.”

— Gaston Bachelard

83. “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?”

— Gaston Bachelard

84. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

85. “Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.”

— Gaston Bachelard

86. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

87. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

88. “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...”

— Gaston Bachelard

89. “In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.”

— Gaston Bachelard

90. “Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language.”

— Gaston Bachelard

91. “Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.”

— Gaston Bachelard

92. “The words of the world want to make sentences.”

— Gaston Bachelard

93. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

94. “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

95. “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.””

— Gaston Bachelard

96. “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.”

— Gaston Bachelard

97. “The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.”

— Gaston Bachelard

98. “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.”

— Gaston Bachelard

99. “Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.”

— Gaston Bachelard

100. “Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.”

— Gaston Bachelard