Bachelard Gaston Quotes & Sayings

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

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison. — Gaston Bachelard

I was born in a country of brooks and rivers, in a corner of Champagne, called Le Vallage for the great number of its valleys. The most beautiful of its places for me was the hollow of a valley by the side of fresh water, in the shade of willows ... My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village ... Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green ... The stream doesn't have to be ours; the water doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. — Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image [ ... ] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.
Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Language dreams. — Gaston Bachelard

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude. — Gaston Bachelard

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization. — Gaston Bachelard

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie. — Gaston Bachelard

We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us. — Gaston Bachelard

When the image is new, the world is new. — Gaston Bachelard

As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!" And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude. — Gaston Bachelard

Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest — Gaston Bachelard

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water. — Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image exists apart from causality. — 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. — 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? — Gaston Bachelard

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry. — Gaston Bachelard

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies. — Gaston Bachelard

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

7502Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn't imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of face, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. — Gaston Bachelard

By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called "Air and Dreams". he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. "Air," Bachelard writes, "is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy." Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life. — Michael Pollan

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration. — Gaston Bachelard

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn ... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter." — Gaston Bachelard

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak ... it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us. — Gaston Bachelard

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows. — Gaston Bachelard

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world. — Gaston Bachelard

Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls. — Gaston Bachelard

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us. — Gaston Bachelard

The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written. — Gaston Bachelard

One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in. — Gaston Bachelard

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

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know. — Gaston Bachelard

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst. — Gaston Bachelard

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented. — Gaston Bachelard

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles ... And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery. — Gaston Bachelard

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. — 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? — Gaston Bachelard

In my book entitled 'L'eau et les reves, I collected many other literary images in which the pond is the very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water the first view that the universe has of itself, and the heightened beauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very root of cosmic narcissism. — Gaston Bachelard

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

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

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. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul. — Gaston Bachelard

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms. — Gaston Bachelard

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place. — Gaston Bachelard

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

I shall never find a better document for a phenomenology of a being which is at once established in its roundness and developing in it. Rilke's tree propagates in green spheres a roundness that is a victory over accidents of form and the capricious events of mobility. Here becoming has countless forms, countless leaves, but being is subject to no dispersion: If I could ever succeed in grouping together all the images of being, all the multiple, changing images that, in spite of everything, illustrate permanence of being, Rilke's tree would open an important chapter in my album of concrete metaphysics. — Gaston Bachelard

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. — Gaston Bachelard

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances. — Gaston Bachelard

That beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers, and glittering streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the thing that impresses us most, and which we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the space of the scene it occupies, as a piece of gossamer on a near-at-hand bush, nor in any wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but because the gossamer is known by us for a little bit of spider's work, and the other grey film is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high, inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it, and yet all the while the thoughts and knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them. — Gaston Bachelard

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

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception? — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child. — Gaston Bachelard

The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves as a reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn't reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is considered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal useful irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self. — Gaston Bachelard

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. — Gaston Bachelard

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth. — Gaston Bachelard

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce" on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. 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. — Gaston Bachelard

The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity. — Gaston Bachelard

We must listen to poets. — Gaston Bachelard

Man is an imagining being. — Gaston Bachelard

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade ... I live in great density ... Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage ... In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities. — Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche — 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 — Gaston Bachelard

What a concentration of images in Pasternak's swallow's nest! And, in reality, why should we stop building and molding the world's clay about our own shelters? Mankind's nest, like his world, is never finished. And imagination helps us to continue it. A poet cannot leave such a great image as this, nor, to be more exact, can such an image leave its poet. Boris Pasternak also wrote Man himself is mute, and it is the image that speaks. For it is obvious that the image alone can keep pace with nature. — Gaston Bachelard

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

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. — Gaston Bachelard

Childhood lasts all through life. — Gaston Bachelard

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. — Gaston Bachelard

We understand nature by resisting it. — Gaston Bachelard

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. — Gaston Bachelard

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom! — Gaston Bachelard

The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. — 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. — 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. — Gaston Bachelard

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives. — Gaston Bachelard

The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light. — Gaston Bachelard

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem. — Gaston Bachelard