Gaston Bachelard Quotes

There is no original truth, only original error.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Man is an imagining being.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

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

Childhood 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.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

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

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

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.

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.

The words of the world want to make sentences.