Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

The world is intense before becoming complex.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.

There is no original truth, only original error.

Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

These little women are very important, and those that appear to be the humblest, often assume great authority in their homes.

The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.

The most diverse beings are made substantive by the flame. Only an adjective is necessary to make them more specific. A cursory reader will perhaps see no more here than stylistic play. But if he participates in the inflammatory intuition of a poetic philosopher, he will understand that the flame is the source for a living creature. Life is a fire.

Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.

How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries. For a dreamer, a dreamer of words, they are all swollen with insanities. Besides, let anyone dream, and incubate a very familiar word for a little while. Then the must unexpected rare things hatch out of the word which was sleeping in its inert meaning, like a fossil of meaning.

Love is never finished expressing itself.

We understand nature by resisting it.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

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

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.