223 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

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

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.