Gaston Bachelard Quotes on Life
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher of science and imagination whose work spanned both rigorous epistemology and a phenomenology of poetic reverie. This page collects quotes attributed to Gaston Bachelard on the topic of life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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