Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

“Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”

“Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.”

“The words of the world want to make sentences.”

“Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.”

“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”

“So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.”

“One must always maintain ones 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 childs world and thus a world event.”

“Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.”

“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.”

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.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

We must listen to poets.

Here is Menards 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.

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of readers pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.