Gaston Bachelard Quotes

“Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him." - Gaston Bachelard, "Reveries on Reverie (Anima - Animus)", The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Page 88”

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

“You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!”

“I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.”

“Celine glanced up as she passed under an arch, at another of the chateau’s decorations, her personal favorite: the entwined letters G and R, carved over every doorway. Family legend had it that one of the original owners of the chateau, a knight by the name of Sir Gaston de Varennes, was responsible for that bit of artwork. Sir Gaston, it seemed, had been quite a ladies’ man—until he had met and married his wife, whom he loved so much, he had had her initial engraved with his in every castle he owned.”

“Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?”

“Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!”

“Never spit in a lion's face when you've got your hand in his mouth.”

“That's the value of a college education... I don't know anywhere in the world where you can make an investment and make that kind of return.”

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