Gaston Bachelard > Quotes

“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

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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, The Poetics of Space

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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

“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...”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

“When the image is new, the world is new.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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 Poetics of Space

“Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“We must listen to poets.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
― 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. ”
― 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 Poetics of Space

“The poetic image exists apart from causality.”
― 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!”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“عندما تبصقُ ريشتي.. أفكّرُ خطأ، من يستطيع أن يعيد لي محبرة الطفولة؟".”
― 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

“Nema ništa gore nego voljeti nekoga tko vas ne voli,a istovremeno je to najljepša stvar koja mi se ikada dogodila. Voljeti nekoga tko i vas voli,to je narcizam..... Voljeti nekoga tko vas ne voli...To je ljubav”
― Gaston Bachelard

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“El sueño de la noche no nos pertenece. No es nuestra propiedad. Para nosotros es un raptor, el más desconcertante de los raptores: nos arrebata nuestro ser. Las noches no tienen historia. No se ligan unas a otras. Y cuando se ha vivido mucho, cuando ya se han vivido unas veinte mil noches, nunca sabemos en qué noche antigua, muy antigua, hemos partido hacia el sueño. La noche no tiene futuro. Sin duda, hay noches menos negras en las que nuestro ser del días vive aún bastante como para negociar con sus recuerdos.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

“Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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, The Poetics of Space

“Em suma, é preciso confessar que existem dois tipos de leitura: a leitura em animus e a leitura em anima. Não sou o mesmo homem quando leio um livro de idéias, em que o animus deve ficar vigilante, pronto para a crítica, pronto para a réplica, ou um livro de poeta, em que as imagens devem ser recebidas numa espécie de acolhimento transcendental dos dons. Ah, para fazer eco a esse dom absoluto que é uma imagem de poeta seria necessário que nossa anima pudesse escrever um hino de agradecimento! O animus lê pouco; a anima, muito.
Não é raro o meu animus repreender-me por ler demais.
Ler, ler sempre, melíflua paixão da anima. Mas quando, depois de haver lido tudo, entregamo-nos à tarefa, com devaneios, de fazer um livro, o esforço cabe ao animus. E sempre um duro mister, esse de escrever um livro. Somos sempre tentados a limitar-nos a sonhar.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie