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Our house is our corner of the world.

Gaston Bachelard

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
GASTON BACHELARD

Expression History Lost Poet Poetry Reality
Instead 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 BACHELARD

Calm Dreams Nightmare People
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
GASTON BACHELARD

Experience Image Imagination Kill
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARD

Comparison Diminish Quality Term
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
GASTON BACHELARD

Blank Dreams Empty Ourselves Page Right Word
There is no original truth, only original error.
GASTON BACHELARD

Errors Original Truth
Nobody 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 BACHELARD

Desire Poet Reading Temptations Writing
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
GASTON BACHELARD

Knowledge Philosophy Question Science
A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
GASTON BACHELARD

Experience Home Science Space
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
To 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 BACHELARD

Destiny Disappear Finding Infinity Nature Water
The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
GASTON BACHELARD

Evidence Intimate Possible Thirst True Water
We understand nature by resisting it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Nature One Liner Resistance Understand
Man is an imagining being.
GASTON BACHELARD

Imagination Man One Liner
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARD

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

Description Object Slave Subject
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreamer Dreams Night
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
GASTON BACHELARD

Small Story Word World
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 BACHELARD

Corrective Hope Ideas Invention Repeat
We must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARD

Listening One Liner Poet
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
GASTON BACHELARD

Alive Beautiful Feeling Reading
The words of the world want to make sentences.
GASTON BACHELARD

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

Act Direct Image Origin
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

Children Event Life World
Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?
GASTON BACHELARD

Action Imagination Perception Reality
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD

Love Preparation Soul Sweet

Our house is our corner of the world.

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Our house is our corner of the world.

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