Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Gaston BachelardRead
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that understanding and simplifying the complexities of life allows one to have better control and appreciation of it.
Gaston Bachelard's quote reflects the idea that intellectual clarity and the ability to condense the vastness of the world into manageable concepts enhance our sense of ownership and mastery over our surroundings. By miniaturizing, or breaking down the world into simpler, more digestible elements, we can navigate through its complexities with greater ease and insight, leading to a more profound connection with our environment.
Themes
MiniaturizingWorldUnderstandingMasterySimplicity
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophy class when discussing the importance of understanding complex theories in a simplified manner.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Gaston BachelardRead
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston BachelardRead
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston BachelardRead
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
Gaston BachelardRead
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
Gaston BachelardRead
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