True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
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
Gaston Bachelard
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard
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.
Gaston Bachelard
The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.
Gaston Bachelard
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston Bachelard
One must always maintain ones connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
Gaston Bachelard
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Gaston Bachelard