Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

Among his myriad achievements, perhaps his lasting heritage is a renewal of emphasis on symbol and poetic meaning in fields like architecture that became overwhelmingly concerned with form and structure

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes of which have not been sufficiently investigated. Nor

the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in this solitude.

But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion.

De waarheid is een gecorrigeerde vergissing.

Le mot inducteur [est] l'image première productrice d'images secondaires. Si l'on suit cette image comme système d'analyse, l'analyse s'ordonne d'elle-même. Au contraire, faute d'attention à cette image inductrice, des pages entières paraissent obscures, pauvres, froides. Elles sont inertes. On n'a pas épousé leur courant de vie.

Par l'imagination nous abandonnons le cours ordinaire des choses. Percevoir et imaginer sont aussi antithétiques que présence et absence. Imaginer c'est s'absenter, c'est s'élancer vers une vie nouvelle.

Avouer qu'on s'était trompé, c'est rendre le plus éclatant hommage à la perspicacité de son esprit.

Avant de penser, il faut étudier. Seuls les philosophes pensent avant d'étudier.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

Images discovered by men evolve slowly, painfully; hence Jacques Bousquet's profound remark: A new image costs humanity as much labor as a new characteristic costs a plant.

And for a dreamer of words, what calm there is in the word round. How peacefully it makes one's mouth, lips, and the being of breath become round. Because this too should be spoken by a philosopher who believes in the poetic substance of speech.

The individual is not the sum of his common impressions but of his unusual ones.

the unconscious cannot be civilized.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.

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?

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

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

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.