French philosopher (1884-1962)
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
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.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
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.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
The most diverse beings are made substantive by the flame. Only an adjective is necessary to make them more specific. A cursory reader will perhaps see no more here than stylistic play. But if he participates in the inflammatory intuition of a poetic philosopher, he will understand that the flame is the source for a living creature. Life is a fire.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Flame of a Candle
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
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.
GASTON BACHELARD
introduction, Water and Dreams
These little women are very important, and those that appear to be the humblest, often assume great authority in their homes.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
There is no original truth, only original error.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
Love is never finished expressing itself.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD
introduction, Water and Dreams
Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries. For a dreamer, a dreamer of words, they are all swollen with insanities. Besides, let anyone dream, and incubate a very familiar word for a little while. Then the must unexpected rare things hatch out of the word which was sleeping in its inert meaning, like a fossil of meaning.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire
How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos