223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

Le mot inducteur [est] l'image première productrice d'images secondaires. Si l'on suit cette image comme système d'analyse, l'analyse s'ordonne d'elle-même. Au contraire, faute d'attention à cette image inductrice, des pages entières paraissent obscures, pauvres, froides. Elles sont inertes. On n'a pas épousé leur courant de vie.

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.