One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARDOne must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARDA house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.
GASTON BACHELARDBy 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 BACHELARDAny comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARDIdeas 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 BACHELARDThe metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
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 BACHELARDIt is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
GASTON BACHELARDDreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
GASTON BACHELARDThere is no original truth, only original error.
GASTON BACHELARDA 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 BACHELARDEmpirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
GASTON BACHELARDThe reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARDEven a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
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 BACHELARDThe words of the world want to make sentences.
GASTON BACHELARD