Gaston Bachelard
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.Collection: Peace
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.Collection: Poetry
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.Collection: Science
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Morning
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.Collection: Imagination
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.Collection: Poetry
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
The words of the world want to make sentences.
There is no original truth, only original error.
Man is an imagining being.
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peaceCollection: Dream
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.Collection: Space
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.Collection: States
The blank page gives us the right to dream.Collection: Dream
A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.Collection: Space
Our house is our corner of the world.Collection: House
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Integrity
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.Collection: Wind
Childhood lasts all through life.Collection: Childhood
One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.Collection: House
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Self
He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.Collection: Teach
Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?Collection: Real
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.Collection: Nature
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.Collection: Love
By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.Collection: Dream
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.Collection: Would Be
Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.Collection: Dream
It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.Collection: Wish
Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.Collection: Book
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.Collection: Dream
The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.Collection: Sleep
The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.Collection: Vocabulary
It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.Collection: Sleep
What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?Collection: Substance
Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.Collection: Giving
In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.Collection: Knowledge
The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psycheCollection: Poetic