223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.

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... 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.

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.

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.

All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.