Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

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

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

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.

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.

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

There is no original truth, only original error.

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

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

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.

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

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection

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

Our house is our corner of the world.

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