Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Gaston Bachelard (French Philosopher)

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) was a French epistemologist and philosopher of science. His work influenced the ideas of later French intellectuals, most notably Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault.

Born in Bar-sur-Aube, France, Bachelard had an extraordinary range of interests and influence in the history of science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism. He connected these themes in such works as La Psychanalyse du feu (1937, ‘Psychoanalysis of Fire’) and La Flamme d’une chandelle (1961, ‘The Flame of a Candle.’)

Bachelard became a philosopher late in life. He had previously taught physics and chemistry in his hometown’s college. His knowledge of physics later enabled him to determine the epistemological change brought about by modern science and, more specifically, to assess the growing gap between it and classical physics.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Gaston Bachelard

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.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Sleep

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Reading, Books

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

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable, immobile world.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Children

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Life and Living

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Ideas

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Art, Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

There is no original truth, only original error.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Mistakes

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Desires, Desire

The words of the world want to make sentences.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Words

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Philosophy

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Past, The Past

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Dreams

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Society, Events, Children

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Progress

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Language

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Words

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Books, Literature

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.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Home

Man is an imagining being.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Imagination

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
Gaston Bachelard
Topics: Inner-child

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