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
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Ideas are developed as responses to previous errors or shortcomings, aiming to refine our understanding.
In this quote, Gaston Bachelard suggests that the process of generating new ideas is inherently linked to learning from past mistakes. By continuously revising and correcting previous notions, we can uncover ideas that hold true value and validity, emphasizing the importance of reflection and adaptation in intellectual progress.
Themes
IdeasPastRectificationInnovationLearning
In practice
Example use cases
During a team meeting, to encourage innovation, one might say Bachelard's quote to emphasize learning from previous projects.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes βOf 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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