Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Everything is only a dream.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

I think people dream in their own way, dreams are extremely personal, even from person to person. They are completely individual.

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

Dreams cannot be tamed. Dreamers cannot be ruled.

We grow up thinking that the best answer is in someone else's brain. Much of our education is an elaborate game of 'guess what's in the teacher's head?' What the world really needs to know right now is what kind of dreams and ideas are in your head.

There are as many preferences as there are men.

What's happening is merely what's happening. How you feel about it is another matter.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

Everyone has the talent to some degree: even making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you know whether it tastes better to you with raspberry jam or grape jelly; on chewy pumpernickel or white toast.

Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.