Top 140 Gaston Bachelard Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.”

— Gaston Bachelard

102. “The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

104. “In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a “force” when it no longer has individuality?”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

107. “It is also a terrible trait of men that they should be incapable of understanding the forces of the universe intuitively, otherwise than in terms of a psychology of wrath.”

— Gaston Bachelard

108. “All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.”

— Gaston Bachelard

109. “The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.”

— Gaston Bachelard

110. “The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet’s daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one’s thoughts, but also into one’s daydreams. Language dreams.”

— Gaston Bachelard

111. “Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.”

— Gaston Bachelard

112. “An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.”

— Gaston Bachelard

113. “In Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, we read: “An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon.” Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: “Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.”

— Gaston Bachelard

114. “In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

— Gaston Bachelard

115. “The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.”

— Gaston Bachelard

116. “How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.”

— Gaston Bachelard

117. “It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet’s soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.”

— Gaston Bachelard

118. “True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.”

— Gaston Bachelard

119. “Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.”

— Gaston Bachelard

120. “The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories.”

— Gaston Bachelard

121. “Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer... In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”

— Gaston Bachelard

122. “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

123. “Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!”

— Gaston Bachelard

124. “Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.”

— Gaston Bachelard

125. “The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.”

— Gaston Bachelard

126. “In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I “naturalize” the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: “That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.” This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.”

— Gaston Bachelard

127. “It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.”

— Gaston Bachelard

128. “If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice-look for its adjective.”

— Gaston Bachelard

129. “Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.”

— Gaston Bachelard

130. “Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.”

— Gaston Bachelard

131. “Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.”

— Gaston Bachelard

132. “All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.”

— Gaston Bachelard

133. “An anguishing book offers anguished people a homeopathy of anguish.”

— Gaston Bachelard

134. “Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.”

— Gaston Bachelard

135. “Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.”

— Gaston Bachelard

136. “To sum up, while we do not seek to instruct the reader, we should feel rewarded for our efforts if we can persuade him to practice an exercise at which we are a master: to laugh at oneself. No progress is possible in the acquisition of objective knowledge without this self-critical irony.”

— Gaston Bachelard

137. “The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language.”

— Gaston Bachelard

138. “If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?”

— Gaston Bachelard

139. “In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”

— Gaston Bachelard

140. “In my book entitled ‘L’eau et les reves, I collected many other literary images in which the pond is the very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water the first view that the universe has of itself, and the heightened beauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very root of cosmic narcissism.”

— Gaston Bachelard

141. “In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own.”

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

143. “Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing.”

— Gaston Bachelard

144. “To speak well is part of living well.”

— Gaston Bachelard

145. “A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.”

— Gaston Bachelard

146. “Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.”

— Gaston Bachelard