Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

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

An anguishing book offers anguished people a homeopathy of anguish.

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

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.

Nous souffrons par les rêves. Nous guérissons par les rêves.

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

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.

What a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness! Oh, my roads and their cadence.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

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

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

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.

En cuanto a nosotros, aficionados a la lectura feliz, no leemos ni releemos más que lo que nos gusta, con un pequeño orgullo de lector mezclado con mucho entusiasmo.

De um modo geral, os 'fatos' não explicam os 'valores'. Bas obras de imaginação poética, os valores têm tal signo de novidade que tudo o que deriva do passado é inerte com relação a eles. Toda memória precisa ser reimaginada. Temos na memória microfilmes que só podem ser lidos quando recebem a luz viva da imaginação.

Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.

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.

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.

To speak well is part of living well.

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

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.

Un rêve qui ne change pas les dimensions du monde est-il vraiment un rêve ?

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.

The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories

L'imagination n'est pas, comme le suggère l'étymologie, la faculté de former des images de la réalité ; elle est la faculté de former des images qui dépassent la réalité, qui chantent la réalité. Elle est une faculté de surhumanité.