Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Space, Imagination, House

  "'Large White House Speaking' by Mark Irwin" reviewed by Alexis Orgera, therumpus.net. April 23, 2014.

  44 Copy quote

• The blank page gives us the right to dream.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Giving, Pages

  "The Poetics of Reverie". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1960.

  27 Copy quote

• The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Owning A Home, House

  Gaston Bachelard (2014). “The Poetics of Space”, p.34, Penguin

  30 Copy quote

• Our house is our corner of the world.

  Gaston Bachelard

  House, World, Corners

  34 Copy quote

• A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Space, House, Boxes

  Gaston Bachelard (2014). “The Poetics of Space”, p.55, Penguin

  50 Copy quote

• It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

  Gaston Bachelard

  States, Impermanence, Finality

  11 Copy quote

• Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Memories, Simple, Names

  Gaston Bachelard (2014). “The Poetics of Space”, p.35, Penguin

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Integrity, Lying, Suffering

  Gaston Bachelard's epigraph to Seamus Heaney "An Open Letter", 1983.

  51 Copy quote

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

  Gaston Bachelard

  Moving On, Wise, Moving Forward

  "Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books)". Book by Gaston Bachelard edited by Suzanne Bachelard, 1988.

  73 Copy quote

• One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

  Gaston Bachelard

  House

  "The Poetics of Space". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1964.

  13 Copy quote

• Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Wind, Sky, Roots

  42 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Peace, Home

  "The Poetics of Space". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1964.

  76 Copy quote

• We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. 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

  Dream, Memories, Real

  16 Copy quote

• Childhood lasts all through life.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Childhood, Lasts

  "The Poetics of Reverie". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1960.

  16 Copy quote

• To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Destiny, Men, Deep Water

  "Water and Dreams". Book by Gaston Bachelard, 1942.

  25 Copy quote

• Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

  Gaston Bachelard

  Real, Imagination, Perception

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Childhood, Reimagining

  7 Copy quote

• We understand nature by resisting it.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Miscellaneous, Resisting

  Gaston Bachelard (2002). “The formation of the scientific mind”, Clinamen Press Ltd.

  8 Copy quote

• Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dreamer, World, Bears

  "What is the origin of the name al-Qaida?" by Giles Foden, www.theguardian.com. August 24, 2002.

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Names, Solitude

  18 Copy quote

• Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Life, Children, Events

  "Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (The Phoenix, a Linguistic Phenomenon)". Book by Gaston Bachelard edited by Suzanne Bachelard, 1988.

  54 Copy quote

• Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Nature, Moving, Space

  32 Copy quote

• The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Taken, Reality, Profound

  18 Copy quote

• The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Giving, Poetry

  11 Copy quote

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

  Gaston Bachelard

  Love, Love Is, Finished

  28 Copy quote

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