Gaston Bachelard

We must listen to poets.

— Gaston Bachelard

Childhood lasts all through life.

— Gaston Bachelard

The words of the world want to make sentences.

— Gaston Bachelard

“De waarheid is een gecorrigeerde vergissing.”

— Gaston Bachelard

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.

— Gaston Bachelard

We understand nature by resisting it.

— Gaston Bachelard

“Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.”

— Gaston Bachelard

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

— Gaston Bachelard

The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

— Gaston Bachelard

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

— Gaston Bachelard

There is no original truth, only original error.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

— Gaston Bachelard

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become…

— Gaston Bachelard

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

— Gaston Bachelard

It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does…

— Gaston Bachelard

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to…

— Gaston Bachelard

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

— Gaston Bachelard

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

— Gaston Bachelard

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in…

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which…

— Gaston Bachelard

It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is…

— Gaston Bachelard

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for…

— Gaston Bachelard

Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul…

— Gaston Bachelard

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a…

— Gaston Bachelard

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not…

— Gaston Bachelard

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could…

— Gaston Bachelard

Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we…

— Gaston Bachelard

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on.…

— Gaston Bachelard

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in…

— Gaston Bachelard

“In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles .…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Pierre-Jean Jouve writes: "poetry is a soul inaugurating form". The soul inaugurates. Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity.…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they…

— Gaston Bachelard

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate,…

— Gaston Bachelard

The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves as a reality and that we…

— Gaston Bachelard

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page.…

— Gaston Bachelard