223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

To sum up, while we do not seek to instruct the reader, we should feel rewarded for our efforts if we can persuade him to practice an exercise at which we are a master: to laugh at oneself. No progress is possible in the acquisition of objective knowledge without this self-critical irony.

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice-look for its adjective.

One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Every object in the world, loved for its own sake, has a right to its own nothingness. Every being pours out being, a little of its being, the shadow of its being, into its own non-being.

The brook will nonetheless teach you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet’s soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the “exalted” substances.