GASTON BACHELARD QUOTES

French philosopher (1884-1962)

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: poetry


Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Tags: words


Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: ideas


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

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: words


Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Formation of the Scientific Mind

Tags: love


Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Tags: love


Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; 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

The Poetics of Space

Tags: memory


The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Tags: possessions


These little women are very important, and those that appear to be the humblest, often assume great authority in their homes.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space

Tags: women


There is no original truth, only original error.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: mistakes


Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: philosophy


The most diverse beings are made substantive by the flame. Only an adjective is necessary to make them more specific. A cursory reader will perhaps see no more here than stylistic play. But if he participates in the inflammatory intuition of a poetic philosopher, he will understand that the flame is the source for a living creature. Life is a fire.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Flame of a Candle


The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Space


Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Tags: desire


True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

GASTON BACHELARD

introduction, Water and Dreams

Tags: poetry


A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

GASTON BACHELARD

introduction, Water and Dreams

Tags: men


Love is never finished expressing itself.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: love


Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries. For a dreamer, a dreamer of words, they are all swollen with insanities. Besides, let anyone dream, and incubate a very familiar word for a little while. Then the must unexpected rare things hatch out of the word which was sleeping in its inert meaning, like a fossil of meaning.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: words


How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: writing


A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

GASTON BACHELARD

Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

Tags: language