Gaston Bachelard

Man is an imagining being.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

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

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

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

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.

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

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

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.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

There is no original truth, only original error.

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

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

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

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

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.

The metaphor is an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary through the brilliance of any image the distant past resounds with echoes.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.