Gaston Bachelard
Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls.Collection: Strong
The poetic image exists apart from causality.Collection: Causality
In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.Collection: Dream
In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.Collection: Light
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Children
A universe comes to contribute to our happiness when reverie comes to accentuate our repose. You must tell the man who wants to dream well to begin by being happy. Then reverie plays out its veritable destiny; it becomes poetic reverie and by it, in it, everything becomes beautiful. If the dreamer had "the gift" he would turn his reverie into a work. And this work would be grandiose since the dreamed world is automatically grandiose.Collection: Beautiful
The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.Collection: Fall
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.Collection: Dream
Words are clamor-filled shells. There's many a story in the miniature of a single word!Collection: Stories
A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.Collection: Dream
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.Collection: Quality
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.Collection: Life
Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.Collection: Imagination
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.Collection: Life
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.Collection: Dream
If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.Collection: Dream
Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.Collection: Dream
Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!Collection: Dream
The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.Collection: Water
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.Collection: Fall
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.Collection: Description
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.Collection: Science
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: Real
Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.Collection: Time
We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.Collection: Believe
If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?Collection: Feminine
When the image is new, the world is new.Collection: Design
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.Collection: Unity
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.Collection: World
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.Collection: Dreamer
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Dream
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Taken
We understand nature by resisting it.Collection: Miscellaneous
The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.Collection: Water
The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indication that here two dreams are joined together, dreams that be-speak both the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallization and wings that open to the light.Collection: Dream
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.Collection: Truth
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.Collection: Love
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.Collection: Past
When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.Collection: Children
We must listen to poets.Collection: Poet
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
By following "the path of reverie"-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to "do phenomenology."Collection: Dream
There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!Collection: Happiness
Here we are at the very core of the thesis we wish to defend in the present essay: reverie is under the sign of the anima. When the reverie is truly profound, the being who comes to dream within us is our anima. For a philosopher who takes his inspiration from phenomenology, a reverie on reverie is very exactly a phenomenology of the anima, and it is by coordinating reveries on reverie that he hopes to constitute a "Poetics of reverie". In other words, the poetics of reverie is a poetics of the anima.Collection: Dream
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.Collection: Hope