Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Le feu. Il est l'ultra-vivant. Il est intime et universel. Il vit dans notre cœur. Dans le ciel. Il monte des profondeurs de la substance et s'offre comme un amour.

L'être voué à l'eau est un être en vertige. Il meurt à chaque minute, sans cesse quelque chose de sa substance s'écoule. La mort quotidienne n'est pas la mort exubérante du feu qui perce le ciel de ses flèches; la mort quotidienne est la mort de l'eau. L'eau coule toujours, l'eau tombe toujours, elle finit toujours en sa mort horizontale. [...] La peine de l'eau est infinie.

If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire according to the normal methods of psychology, we might conclude that when the poet left behind him the settings of the world, to experience the single setting of immensity, he could only have knowledge of an abstraction come true. Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet, would be merely the pendant of the outside space of geometricians, who seek infinite space with no other sign than infinity itself.

For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being.

Le paradis, à n'en pas douter, n'est qu'une immense bibliothèque.

La ciencia es la estética de la inteligencia.

Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: poetry is a soul inaugurating form. The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the form was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from commonplaces, before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it.

La poésie n'est pas une tradition, c'est un rêve primitif, c'est l'éveil des images premières.

The geometry of a peacock's tail is more aerial: The eyes in a peacock's spread tail are situated at the intersecting point of a double cluster of spirals, that are apparently Archimedean spirals.

D'autres amours viendront bien entendu se greffer sur les premières forces aimantes. Mais toutes ces amours ne pourront jamais détruire la priorité historique de notre premier sentiment. La chronologie du cÅ"ur est indestructible.

L'imagination est une force première. Elle doit naître dans la solitude de l'être imaginant.

Il semble que dans le monde intermédiaire où se mêlent rêverie et réalité, il se réalise une plasticité de l'homme et de son monde sans qu'on ait jamais besoin de savoir où est le principe de cette double malléabilité

In reality, however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

He who buries a treasure buries himself with it. A secret is a grave, and it is not for nothing that a man who can be trusted with a secret boasts that he is like the grave

But shall I have the strength to write this book? For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection.

Ev insanoÄŸlunun kendini ait hissettiÄŸi, hayat?n tüm ötekileÅŸtirmelerine raÄŸmen kiÅŸinin ümitlerinin, hayallerinin ve ac?lar?n?n bar?nd??? "dünya köÅŸesidir

George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, saw life flowing by. "What is more beautiful than a road?" she wrote. "It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life" (Consuelo, vol. II, p. 116). Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.

Like friendship, words sometimes swell, at the dreamer's will, in the loop of a syllable.

To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by his peers always to live on the ground floor?

Quand la cloche des fleurs résonne au sommet des ombelles, toute la terre se tait, tout le ciel parle.

On a shelf in the library are very old books that tell of another past than the one the dreamer has known. Dreams, thoughts and memoires weave a single fabric. The soul dreams and thinks, then it imagines.

Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.

Ce qui ne peut être écrit mérite-t-il d'être vécu ?