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
Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The speaker expresses disinterest in others' dreams, suggesting that they lack substance and rational analysis.
In this quote, Gaston Bachelard reflects on the concept of dreams and the narratives surrounding them, revealing a disdain for tales that lack logical coherence and depth. He emphasizes a rationalist perspective, implying that without thoughtful deliberation and clarity, anecdotes about dreams can seem absurd or insincere, thereby fostering a sense of boredom in listeners who seek meaningful discourse.
Themes
DreamsBoredomRationalismNarrativeInsanity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the value of storytelling, one might cite this quote to argue that not all narratives are engaging if they lack coherence.
More from Gaston Bachelard
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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.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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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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