Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelardwas a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break. He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida, as well as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth27 June 1884
CountryFrance
dream giving pages
The blank page gives us the right to dream.
dream giving solitude
I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting...
dream giving function
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
giving departure matter
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
giving littles irony
Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.
disappointment ideas giving
Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
dream writing giving
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
destinies future opens poetic poetry
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
real imagination perception
Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?
childhood germs excess
An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
life wells ifs
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
real book proof
The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
quality term expressive
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
description subjects objects
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.