Gaston Bachelard Life Quotations

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn't really our solitude.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.