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
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
Interpretation
Imagining holds more value than mere observation, as reality can diminish the essence of experiences.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that the act of verifying or experiencing images can strip them of their awe and mystique, leading to a less fulfilling interaction with the world. He proposes that the imagination allows us to create richer narratives and meanings than what we can derive from direct experiences, emphasizing the importance of creativity and perception in shaping our understanding of reality.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of creativity in education, one could use this quote to emphasize the power of imagination.
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.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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.
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.
They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.'
Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.
In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
What is a farm but a mute gospel?
If we are not even free anymore to decide something as basic as what we wish to eat or drink, how much freedom do we really have left?
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