Gaston Bachelard

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but…

— Gaston Bachelard

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos.…

— Gaston Bachelard

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

— Gaston Bachelard

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest…

— Gaston Bachelard

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the…

— Gaston Bachelard

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking…

— Gaston Bachelard

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past,…

— Gaston Bachelard

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the…

— Gaston Bachelard

There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have…

— Gaston Bachelard

Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life…

— Gaston Bachelard

The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and…

— Gaston Bachelard

“Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add…

— Gaston Bachelard

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a…

— Gaston Bachelard

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It…

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— 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

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of…

— Gaston Bachelard

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.

— 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

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

— 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

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

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which…

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— Gaston Bachelard

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child…

— Gaston Bachelard

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation…

— Gaston Bachelard

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their…

— Gaston Bachelard

In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a…

— Gaston Bachelard

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

— Gaston Bachelard

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from…

— Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea…

— Gaston Bachelard

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

— 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

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of…

— Gaston Bachelard

A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories…

— Gaston Bachelard