223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I “naturalize” the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: “That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.” This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immense is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.

And when a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet like Milosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.

Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language.

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.

It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this “failing asleep”, the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.