Gaston Bachelard Quotes - Page 2

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

We must listen to poets.

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We understand nature by resisting it.

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

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.

There is no original truth, only original error.

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

The words of the world want to make sentences.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.

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.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

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.

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

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.