All taken from the introduction of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

"To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image becomes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul."

"Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge. The dialectics of inspiration and talent become clear if we consider their two poles: the soul and the mind. In my opinion, soul and mind are indispensable for studying the phenomena of the poetic image in their various nuances, above all, for following the evolution of poetic images from the original state of revery to that of execution."

"Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form." (Pierre-Jean Jouve)

"The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at short range. But these acts of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity."

"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. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning which makes its creation an exercise in freedom."

"In poetry, non-knowing is a primal condition; if there exists a skill in the writing of poetry, it is in the minor task of associating images. But the entire life of the image is in its dazzling splendor, in the fact that an image is a transcending of all the premises of sensibility."

"...it is impossible to receive the psychic benefit of poetry unless these two functions of the human pysche--the function of the real and the function of the unreal--are made to co-operate."

"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."

"Poetry, especially in its present endeavors, (can) only correspond to attentive thought that is enamored of something unknown, and essentially receptive to becoming." (Pierre-Jean Jouve)