Philosophy of beauty

Quotes from Gaston BACHELARD:

Art, create, imagine, dream, …

Gaston, Louis, Pierre Bachelard, born in Bar-sur-Aube on June 27, 1884 and died in Paris on October 16, 1962, is a French philosopher of science, poetry and time. He is one of the main representatives of the French school of historical epistemology.(Wikipedia)

An eye of today, an eye of a painter projecting on all things light and splendor, looks, on each page of this book, at the very bottom of the darkness of legendary history. This living eye looks at the greatest of the past: it discovers, it sees, it shows the beings of first life; it brings to life for us this great immobile time where beings are born and grow like inflexible rods, where men are, from the outset, superhuman beings.

The value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary halo.

Imagination finds more reality in what is hidden than in what is shown.

If he dared, a philosopher dreaming in front of a painting by Monet would develop the dialectics of the iris and the nymphea, the dialectic of the straight leaf and the leaf calmly, wisely, heavily supported on the waters.

We are in a century of the image. for good as for bad, we are more than ever undergoing the action of the image.

The value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary halo.

Imagination is not, as etymology suggests, the ability to form images of reality; it is the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing about reality. It is a faculty of superhumanity.

The way we imagine is often more instructive than what we imagine.

A Van Gogh yellow is an alchemist gold, a gold gathered from a thousand flowers, developed like solar honey. It’s never just wheat gold, flame, or straw chair; it is a gold forever individualized by the endless dreams of genius. It no longer belongs to the world, but it is the good of a man, the heart of a man, the basic truth found in contemplation of a lifetime. This fire in the sky magnifies the stars. So far goes the temerity of an active element, an element which excites matter enough to make it a new light.