Gaston Bachelard Quotes on Mind
Gaston Bachelard reflected on the mind from two directions at once, as a philosopher of science and as a phenomenologist of imagination, and the quotes gathered here draw on both. From his epistemology comes a sober view of the thinking mind as fallible and obstacle-ridden: in a phrase marked here as attributed, the mind is essentially a factory of mistakes, and knowledge advances only by overcoming earlier error. From his poetics comes a far more generous estimate of the imagination, which he held to be the source of all that is decisive in the soul. Bachelard prized reverie not as an empty or idle state but as the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul. Drawn from The Formation of the Scientific Mind and The Poetics of Reverie, these passages present a mind that is error-prone in science yet richly creative in imagination.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“The mind is essentially a factory of mistakes.”
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“All that is decisive in the soul has its source in the imagination.”
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Attributed to Gaston Bachelard:
“A house is the topography of our intimate being.”
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“True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.”
Introduction -
“Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie)(1960) | Ch. 2, sect. 3 -
“Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.”
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie)(1960) | Introduction, sect. 4