The Poetics of Space Quotes

“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

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

“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

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

“هنالك أطفال يتخلون عن اللعب لينصرفوا إلى زاوية في حجرة السطح يمارسون ضجرهم فيها. لكم أشتاق إلى علية ضجري عندما تجعلني تعقيدات الحياة أفقد بذرة الحرية ذاتها!”
― غاستون باشلار, The Poetics of Space

“الفن، هو إثراء لخصوبة الحياة، ونوع من المناقشة بين أنواع الدهشة التي تنبه وعينا وتمنعه من الخدر”
― غاستون باشلار, The Poetics of Space

“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

“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

“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

“ـ"اننا نريح أنفسنا من خلال أن نعايش مرة أخرى ذكريات الحماية...لسنا مؤرخين، بل نحن أقرب إلى الشعراء، وقد تكون انفعالاتنا ليست إلا تعبير عن الشعر الذي فقدناه" ـ”
― غاستون باشلار, جماليات المكان

“للشعر العظيم تأثير كبير على روح اللغة. إنه يوقظ صورا إمحت، ويؤكد في الوقت ذاته طبيعة الكلام غير المتوقعة. واذا اعتبرنا الكلام ذا طبيعة غير متوقعة، ألا يكون هذا تدريبا على ظاهرة الحرية؟ أليس متعة يمارسها الخيال حين يعبث بالرقباء! عند هذا تصبح الفنون الشعرية هي الرقيبة”
― غاستون باشلار, The Poetics of Space

“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

“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

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“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, The Poetics of Space

“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