Gaston Bachelard Quotes on Life
Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of science and of poetic imagination, reflected on life with a particular attention to childhood and reverie, and the quotes gathered here express that. Bachelard held that childhood is not simply left behind: childhood lasts all through life, returning to animate broad sections of adult life, and poets help us recover this permanent, durable world within us. He noted a tension between living and expressing life, suggesting that to live life well is in some sense to express life poorly, since perfect expression draws one out of the living of it. He also took the inner world of the child with full seriousness, holding that even a minor event in a child's life is, for that child, a world event. Drawn from The Poetics of Reverie and his late writings, these passages present life as animated throughout by the persistence of childhood.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“A house is the topography of our intimate being.”
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“The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie)(1960) | Introduction, sect. 6 -
“To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.”
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire(1988) | A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books -
“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.”
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire(1988) | A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books -
“Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.”
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire(1988) | The Phoenix, a Linguistic Phenomenon , ch. 1