Quotes by Gaston Bachelard

It is the silence, rather, that obliges the poet to listen, and gives the dream greater intimacy. We hardly know where to situate this silence, whether in the vast world or in the immense past. But we do know that it comes from beyond a wind that dies down or a rain that grows gentle.

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

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

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.

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.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves?

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.