The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARDThe house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARDWe must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARDWords are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
GASTON BACHELARDChildhood 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 BACHELARDAn excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
GASTON BACHELARDReverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
GASTON BACHELARDEmpirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
GASTON BACHELARDAll the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
GASTON BACHELARDIf we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
GASTON BACHELARDEvery 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 BACHELARDLove is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARDThe only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
GASTON BACHELARDPoetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
GASTON BACHELARDThe characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARDAny comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
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 BACHELARD