Gaston Bachelard

When the image is new, the world is new.

— Gaston Bachelard

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

— Gaston Bachelard

Man is an imagining being.

— Gaston Bachelard

“Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.”

— Gaston Bachelard

Our house is our corner of the world.

— Gaston Bachelard

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

— Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image exists apart from causality.

— Gaston Bachelard

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

— Gaston Bachelard

Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.

— Gaston Bachelard

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

— Gaston Bachelard

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

— Gaston Bachelard

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to…

— Gaston Bachelard

Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being,…

— Gaston Bachelard

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— 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

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy… aerial joy is freedom.

— Gaston Bachelard

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They…

— Gaston Bachelard

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses…

— Gaston Bachelard

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood?…

— 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…

— Gaston Bachelard

In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the…

— Gaston Bachelard

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of…

— Gaston Bachelard

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its…

— Gaston Bachelard

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or…

— Gaston Bachelard

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images…

— Gaston Bachelard

“That beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers, and glittering streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How­ ever spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a…

— Gaston Bachelard

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign…

— Gaston Bachelard

Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple…

— Gaston Bachelard

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste,…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the…

— Gaston Bachelard