223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

Un rêve qui ne change pas les dimensions du monde est-il vraiment un rêve ?

Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.

Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him." - Gaston Bachelard, "Reveries on Reverie (Anima - Animus)", The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Page 88

Contemplating a flame perpetuates a primordial reverie. It separates us from the world and enlarges our world as dreamers. In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away. The flame is there, feeble and tiny, struggling to stay in existence, and the dreamer goes on to dream of elsewhere, losing his own being by dreaming on a grand, on a too grand scale by dreaming of the world.

L'être voué à l'eau est un être en vertige. Il meurt à chaque minute, sans cesse quelque chose de sa substance s'écoule. La mort quotidienne n'est pas la mort exubérante du feu qui perce le ciel de ses flèches; la mort quotidienne est la mort de l'eau. L'eau coule toujours, l'eau tombe toujours, elle finit toujours en sa mort horizontale. [...] La peine de l'eau est infinie.

Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.

In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

An anguishing book offers anguished people a homeopathy of anguish.