Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
GASTON BACHELARDIdeas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
GASTON BACHELARDOne must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARDWhen the image is new, the world is new.
GASTON BACHELARDInstead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.
GASTON BACHELARDThe characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARDCosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.
GASTON BACHELARDA clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
GASTON BACHELARDNobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
GASTON BACHELARDA book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
GASTON BACHELARDA special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARDOur 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 BACHELARDThe subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
GASTON BACHELARDAny comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARDWhat is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak… It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
GASTON BACHELARDTo live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARDThere are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
GASTON BACHELARD