Gaston Bachelard Quotes

I am still a person with a sense of superficiality that I'm trying to challenge.

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

You only grow when you are alone.

People talk about this 'bucket list': 'I need to go to this country, I need to skydive.' Whereas I need to think as much as I can, to feel as much as I can, to be conscious and observe and understand me and the people around me as much as I can.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

My generation spends too much time in the mirror and not enough looking inside ourselves.

He who looks without, dreams; he who looks within, awakes.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

I've always said, rather glibly, that the message of my career has been about individualism, about getting to know yourself and taking responsibility, not just for what you do, but what you think.

Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself?

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

The real preparation for education is a study of one's self. The training of the teacher...is something far more than a learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.

How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.

A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning.

To read your own mind is to look at your self and read your soul. Hatred becomes love and that is the path I am working on

Access to your true essence will give you insight into the mirror of relationship, because all relationship is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.

There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what's of value.