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A 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 Bachelard

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
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
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
GASTON BACHELARD

Born Call Life Spirituality Substance
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
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD

Beautiful Born Existence Kind Language Special
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.
GASTON BACHELARD

Distance Edge Imagination Live Past Soul Time Universe
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
GASTON BACHELARD

Alive Beautiful Feeling Reading
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Expression Love Poet
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
GASTON BACHELARD

Addition Book Day Expression Life
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARD

Benefit Dreams Home Peace Protection
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Clever Myself Possession World
The blank page gives us the right to dream.
GASTON BACHELARD

Blank Dreams Page Right
When the image is new, the world is new.
GASTON BACHELARD

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

Description Object Slave Subject
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
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Fire Flare Forgot Ourselves
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
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Final Live Oneself State
A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
GASTON BACHELARD

Breathe Conscience Empty Man Myself
A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
GASTON BACHELARD

Experience Home Science Space
When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing… And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Adult Children Lost See Thinking World
Our house is our corner of the world.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Ourselves Perspective World
We must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARD

Listening One Liner Poet
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreamer Dreams Night
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Character Known Ourselves Progress

A 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.

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A 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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