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The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

Gaston Bachelard

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.
GASTON BACHELARD

Escape Project Separate Situation Society Stability State Time Tranquility World
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARD

Calm Reflection World
We must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARD

Listening One Liner Poet
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
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Fiction Greatness Ourselves Poetry Situation
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Cosmos Happiness Human Man Peace Solitude Son World
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 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 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
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
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

Beautiful Book Fact Greatness Human Reading Service Togetherness
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 subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
GASTON BACHELARD

Conscious Listening Oneself Truth
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Fire Flare Forgot Ourselves
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
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARD

Comparison Diminish Quality Term
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
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
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Character Known Ourselves Progress
We understand nature by resisting it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Nature One Liner Resistance Understand
The words of the world want to make sentences.
GASTON BACHELARD

Sentence Word World
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD

Beautiful Born Existence Kind Language Special
An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Excess Germ Poem
If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?
GASTON BACHELARD

Feminine Ourselves Rest Spiritual
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
GASTON BACHELARD

Cosmos End Face Function Imagination Man
There 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 BACHELARD

Help History Liberty Name Original Ourselves Return Solitude Spiritual

The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

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The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

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