"Over-stimulation pollutes the imagination. Too often we fill our minds so full of real information that there is no longer room for the image. Over-indulgence leaves us gluttonous and lethargic. We are better off providing only enough stimulus to begin the creative process and let the imagination serve its purpose."

Personal

"Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are "housed." Our soul is an abode. And by remembering "houses" and "rooms," we learn to abide within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: They are in us as much as we are in them...."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"Not for a second can there be any question of reproducing exactly a spectacle that is already in the past. But I have to re-live it entirely, in a manner that is new...."

Jean Lescure

"Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge."

Jean Lescure, The Poetics of Space

"Consequently, a new definition of a poet is in view, which is: he who knows, that is to say, who transcends, and names what he knows."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"... in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface.... The image offered us by reading thepoem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses.... Here expression creates being."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"It is as though the poem, through its exuberence, awakened new depths in us."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form."

Pierre-Jean Jouve, The Poetics of Space

"In Order to Clarify the Problem of the Poetic Image Philosophically, we shall have to recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination. By this should be understood a study of the phenomenon of the poetic image when it emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man, apprehended in his actuallity."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"Storm makes sense of Shelter, and if the shelter is sound, the shelter makes the surrounding storm good...."

John R. Stilgoe