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A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Gaston Bachelard

Our house is our corner of the world.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Ourselves Perspective World
Childhood 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 BACHELARD

Adult Animation Childhood Finding Life Permanent Return
Every 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 BACHELARD

Home Imagination Ourselves Room Space Symbol
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
GASTON BACHELARD

Gift Mindset Soul Time
The 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

Dreams Life Live Load Ourselves Passion Remain Solitude Time
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
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
The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
GASTON BACHELARD

Happiness Illusion Image Live Nourish Sweet
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARD

Calm Reflection World
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Expression Love Poet
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Character Known Ourselves Progress
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Clever Myself Possession World
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
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
By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD

Children Dreamer Listening Sea 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
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
What 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 BACHELARD

Born Fact Hesitate Lying Ourselves Silence Source Suffering Talk
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.
GASTON BACHELARD

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

Beautiful Born Existence Kind Language Special
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
If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
GASTON BACHELARD

Feminine Ourselves Rest Spiritual
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
All 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 BACHELARD

Awake Consciousness Fall Harmony Poetic Record
We must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARD

Listening One Liner Poet
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
GASTON BACHELARD

Date Determination Intimacy Knowledge Local Space Urgent

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

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A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

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Popular Authors

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