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
Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores the idea of idealization and how dreams influence our perception of love and self.
Gaston Bachelard's quote reflects on the complex process of idealization, suggesting that our dreams and memories intertwine to shape how we perceive and ultimately love others. Rather than merely recalling past experiences, it emphasizes the importance of actively dreaming and envisioning the values of who we love, indicating that this idealized version sustains our aspirations and shapes our identity.
Themes
IdealizationDreamsLoveMemoryAspiration
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker might use this quote in a talk about the power of dreams in shaping our identities.
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
Similar quotes
If there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up; So quick bright things come to confusion.
William ShakespeareRead
The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.
Pope Benedict XviRead
I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.
James McbrideRead
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
Emma GoldmanRead
To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.
John Stuart MillRead
One must care about a world one will not see.
Bertrand RussellRead