Gaston Bachelard

“מי שאינו ממשיך ללמוד אינו ראוי ללמד.”

“אדם אינו פועל אלא כשהוא מרגיש צורך.”

“הדמיון מוצא טוב יותר את הנסתר מאשר את הנגלה.”

“תשוקות גדולות נובעות מחלומות גדולים.”

“כל אמת חדשה נולדת למרות הראיות.”

“אנו מבינים את הטבע כשאנו נאבקים בו.”

“ניסוי מדעי הוא ניסוי מנוגד להתנסות רגילה.”

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

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

“The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.”

“Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.”

“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.”

“Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.”

“A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.”

“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.”

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

“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”

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

“It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, as we wrongly think, but that the imagination lives in the child.”

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