Gaston Bachelard
The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves as a reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn't reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is considered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal useful irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self.Collection: Reality
The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.Collection: Past
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.Collection: Determination
In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a "force" when it no longer has individuality?Collection: Individuality
It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.Collection: Imagination
Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!Collection: Happiness
Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.Collection: Past
To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.Collection: Dream
The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.Collection: Philosophy
In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.Collection: Writing
Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.Collection: Air
It is not a question of observation which propels mankind forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.Collection: Reflection
The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.Collection: Real
Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration.Collection: Inspiration
This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.Collection: Two
Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.Collection: Time
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.Collection: Dream
In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.Collection: Dream
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.Collection: Reading
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.Collection: Imagine
Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.Collection: Dream
A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.Collection: Life
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.Collection: Dream
At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.Collection: Fire
An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.Collection: Childhood
The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.Collection: Life
A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.Collection: Integrity
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?Collection: Reality
The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.Collection: Happiness
Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.Collection: Memories
Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."Collection: Life
It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.Collection: Dream
Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.Collection: Eye
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.Collection: Peace
The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.Collection: Running
The metaphor is~ an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.Collection: Metaphor
Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.Collection: Distance
Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.Collection: Dream
A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.Collection: Beauty
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protectionCollection: Memories
Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.Collection: Disappointment
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!Collection: Stories
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...Collection: Reading