In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I “naturalize” the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: “That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.” This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.

— Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immense is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.

— Gaston Bachelard

In Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, we read: “An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon.” Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: “Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.

— Gaston Bachelard

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

— Gaston Bachelard

To sum up, while we do not seek to instruct the reader, we should feel rewarded for our efforts if we can persuade him to practice an exercise at which we are a master: to laugh at oneself. No progress is possible in the acquisition of objective knowledge without this self-critical irony.

— Gaston Bachelard

Toujours, imaginer sera plus grand que vivre.

— Gaston Bachelard

All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.

— Gaston Bachelard

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet’s daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one’s thoughts, but also into one’s daydreams. Language dreams.

— Gaston Bachelard

Every object in the world, loved for its own sake, has a right to its own nothingness. Every being pours out being, a little of its being, the shadow of its being, into its own non-being.

— Gaston Bachelard

Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language.

— Gaston Bachelard

The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories.

— Gaston Bachelard

The imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth of imagined being that I should like to explore.

— Gaston Bachelard

The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.

— Gaston Bachelard

An anguishing book offers anguished people a homeopathy of anguish.

— Gaston Bachelard

In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own.

— Gaston Bachelard

It is also a terrible trait of men that they should be incapable of understanding the forces of the universe intuitively, otherwise than in terms of a psychology of wrath.

— Gaston Bachelard

In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.

— Gaston Bachelard

To speak well is part of living well.

— Gaston Bachelard

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

— Gaston Bachelard

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

— Gaston Bachelard

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing.

— Gaston Bachelard
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