Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

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!

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.

Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him. - Gaston Bachelard, Reveries on Reverie (Anima - Animus), The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Page 88

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.

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.

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.

L'eau est vraiment l'élément transitoire. Il est la métamorphose ontologique essentielle entre le feu et la terre

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

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

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.

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.

Arbre toujours au milieu De tout ce qui l'entoure Arbre qui savoure La voute des cieux (Tree always in the center Of all that surrounds it Tree feasting upon Heaven's great dome)

Poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.

L'individu n'est pas la somme de ses impressions générales, il est la somme de ses impressions singulières.

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.

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.

We cover the Universe with the drawings we have lived.

Nema ništa gore nego voljeti nekoga tko vas ne voli,a istovremeno je to najljepša stvar koja mi se ikada dogodila. Voljeti nekoga tko i vas voli,to je narcizam..... Voljeti nekoga tko vas ne voli...To je ljubav

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

recalling Bachelard's comment on poetic time in The Poetics of Reverie: "In reverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destiny has not been able to make use of.

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.

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

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.