Explore Quotes by 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.

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

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!

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!

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

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

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

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.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

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.

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

Man is an imagining being.

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

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

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

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

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

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.

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.

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.