223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

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

L'imagination est une force première. Elle doit naître dans la solitude de l'être imaginant.

Par l'imagination nous abandonnons le cours ordinaire des choses. Percevoir et imaginer sont aussi antithétiques que présence et absence. Imaginer c'est s'absenter, c'est s'élancer vers une vie nouvelle.

L'imagination n'est pas, comme le suggère l'étymologie, la faculté de former des images de la réalité ; elle est la faculté de former des images qui dépassent la réalité, qui chantent la réalité. Elle est une faculté de surhumanité.

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting...

We must listen to poets.

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.

In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost.