Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Sometimes my dreams are so deep that I dream that I'm dreaming.

A long time ago, Descartes sad, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you are not thinking, what?

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.

I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.

I dream, therefore I exist.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

We live as we dream - alone.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

When I am asleep I dream what I dream when I am awake. It's a continuous dream.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.