Gaston Bachelard Quotes

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.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

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.

At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.

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.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

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.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.