Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

(Le nouvel esprit scientifique)
Dialectic of Duration. He compared "scientific knowledge" to ordinary knowledge in the way we deal with it and saw error as only illusion: "Scientifically we think the truth as the historical rectification of a long error and we think experience as the rectification of the common and original illusion (illusion première). The role of epistemology in science
Bachelard was a rationalist in the Cartesian sense although he recommended his "non-Cartesian epistemology" as a replacement for the more standard Cartesian epistemology.

He rose to some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie française and influenced many subsequent French philosophers among them Michel Foucault Louis Althusser Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break (obstacle épistémologique et rupture épistémologique).