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Gaston Bachelard Biography

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard (French: [baʃlaʁ]; 27 June 1884 – 16 October 1962) was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique and rupture épistémologique). He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

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Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn. . . The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter. "

Heart, Life, Seed, Tired, Vandercammen, Word

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing. . . And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

Children, Philosophical, Profound, Seeing, Thinking, World

Man is an imagining being.

Imagining, Man, Men

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche

Image, Poetic, Sudden, Surface

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Science, Knowing, Progress, Know

The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.

Admires, Dream, Images, Imagination, Objectivity, Running

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

Deep, Names, Return, Rid, Self, Solitude

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

Peace, Children, Son, Leaves, Human

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

Dream, Fashion, Love Is, Poetries, Touching, Taste

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.

Experiment, Names, Psychology, Reverie, Reveries, Vocabulary

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Hope, Idea, Ideas, Kind, Past

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.

Adults, Animate, Childhood, Life, Returns

Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!

Happiness, Happy, Men, Remembers, Silence, Souls

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

Culture, Drama, Dream, Enough, Interior, Reading

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Clear, Conscience, Lasts, Life, Men, Work

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?

Body, Dignity, Nouns, Proper, Substance, Substances

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Addition, Book, Emergence, Everyday, Expressed, Life

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

Childhood, Excess, Germ, Germs, Poem

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

Proceeds, Question, Response, Scientific Knowledge, Would Be

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Destiny, Speech, Language, Say

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