Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

Childhood lasts all through life.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How­ ever spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.

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.

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles . . . . And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery.

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

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.

The poetic image exists apart from causality.

But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature. Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.

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

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

Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.

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

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

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.

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

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.