Gaston Bachelard Quotes

History happens to one person at a time.

There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

The world is not always a kind place. That's something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help to understand.

There is no person without a world.

It's easier to be skeptical because it's easier to understand that every human lives in their own world.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Every one of us lives in a world that is no larger and no smaller than our understanding.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

It's about whatever I want to make it about. It's my world.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

I think the early years, the first decade of your life, is the most formative in a way.

Our personal dispositions are as windowpanes through which we see the world either as rosy or dull. The way we color the glasses we wear is the way the world seems to us.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

As I continue to mature and navigate the world, there are so many myths that are dispelled for me.

You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.

The only thing we have to give to the world is our own grasp on it.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.