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 live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that expressing life too well can detract from actually living it fully.
Gaston Bachelard's quote evokes the idea that a deep, authentic engagement with life often comes with a level of imperfection in expression. When one becomes too focused on articulating and expressing life's essence perfectly, they may lose the essence of life itself, indicating a paradox where over-analysis or over-articulation can hinder genuine experiences.
In practice
During a philosophy lecture discussing the nature of existence.
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.
For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.
Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.
Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.
He that gives all, though but little, gives much; because God looks not to the quantity of the gift, but to the quality of the givers.
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
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