Gaston Bachelard Quotes

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

We can invent only with memory.

I want people to look at a checkerboard and think of me!

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

Only in your imagination can you revise.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways in science, in politics, in every bold intention.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

Memory feeds imagination.

If you're using your imagination, you tend to look into the past for ideas.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Creativity only resonates if you infuse real life into the work.

We should use our imagination more than our memory.

If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter.

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

Wit is the god of moments, but Genius is the god of ages.