223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.

By following “the path of reverie”-a constantly downhill path-consciousness relaxes and wanders-and consequently becomes clouded. So it is never the right time, when one is dreaming, to “do phenomenology.”

The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language.

The imagination is ceaselessly imagining and enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth of imagined being that I should like to explore.

All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, we read: “An oyster opens wide at full moon. When the crab sees this, it throws a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it from closing and thus have it to feed upon.” Da Vinci adds the following suitable moral to this fable: “Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.

Sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.

In our life as a civilized person in the industrial age, we are invaded by objects; how could an object have a “force” when it no longer has individuality?

In my book entitled ‘L’eau et les reves, I collected many other literary images in which the pond is the very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water the first view that the universe has of itself, and the heightened beauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very root of cosmic narcissism.