Best 144 quotes of Gaston Bachelard on MyQuotes

Gaston Bachelard

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

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    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!

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    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.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    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.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

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    Gaston Bachelard

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

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Here we are at the very core of the thesis we wish to defend in the present essay: reverie is under the sign of the anima. When the reverie is truly profound, the being who comes to dream within us is our anima. For a philosopher who takes his inspiration from phenomenology, a reverie on reverie is very exactly a phenomenology of the anima, and it is by coordinating reveries on reverie that he hopes to constitute a "Poetics of reverie". In other words, the poetics of reverie is a poetics of the anima.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting.

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    Gaston Bachelard

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

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    Gaston Bachelard

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

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    Gaston Bachelard

    If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    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?

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.

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    Gaston Bachelard

    It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.