Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

We will pay a heavy price if we insist on navigating the 21st century with a 20th century mindset.

I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, “Let’s do things differently.” The majority didn’t wake up and say, “Oh, let’s just free the slaves.” ... Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people — usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time — had a better idea and articulated another way. That’s simply how evolution works; it’s the mutation — the member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they’re better adapted for survival.

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.

40% of what I've done was a mistake. I now call it R&D.

A new future requires a new past.

When a new idea assaults the power of established authority, authority always screams out that morality has been affronted. It makes no difference if this idea is that the world is round or that women should vote or that the workers should control industry.

Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.

When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.

At least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you'll never begin.

We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.

The hero is the one with ideas.

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.

If you ever have a new idea, and it's really new, you have to expect that it won't be widely accepted immediately. It's a long hard process.

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.

The new is threatening to those who have mastered the old.

To have a major breakthrough in policy, you have to be able to stop and think.

As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it.

You don't have to be a spiritual seeker, you can be a businessman dealing with the revolution in computers. You could be a congressman, or a scientist. No matter what area of life and endeavor we are in we are seeing the signs of new-paradigm thinking.