black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Gaston Bachelard

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

Description Object Slave Subject
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Fire Flare Forgot Ourselves
The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARD

Allow Dreams Home Peace Protection
Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Imagination Ourselves Room Space Symbol
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn’t really our solitude.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Life Live Load Ourselves Passion Remain Solitude Time
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
GASTON BACHELARD

Small Story Word World
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARD

Comparison Diminish Quality Term
Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Children Cover Imagination Ourselves Possible Solitary
Man is an imagining being.
GASTON BACHELARD

Imagination Man One Liner
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

Growth Space Tree
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.
GASTON BACHELARD

Adult Animation Childhood Finding Life Permanent Return
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHELARD

Creation Desire Difference Man Need
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARD

Calm Reflection World
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
GASTON BACHELARD

Destiny Future Image Language Oneself Poetry Speech

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Gaston Bachelard Quotes