The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARDThe reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARDAny comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARDTo disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.
GASTON BACHELARDA clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
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 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 BACHELARDThe 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 BACHELARDOne must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARDAn excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
GASTON BACHELARDThe house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARDWhy should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?
GASTON BACHELARDThe subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
GASTON BACHELARDChildhood lasts all through life.
GASTON BACHELARDWe are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
GASTON BACHELARDThe characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARDLove is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARD