QuoteProject
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.
Gaston Bachelard
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The soul transcends time, finding peace in its imagination rather than in the past.

This quote by Gaston Bachelard suggests that the essence of the soul exists beyond the constraints of time, emphasizing that true rest and fulfillment come not from reminiscing about the past but from engaging with the boundless possibilities of imagination and reverie. It highlights the idea that our inner world and creativity can provide solace and depth, offering a refuge from the temporal nature of existence.

Themes

SoulImaginationTimeReveriePeace

In practice

Example use cases

During a meditation retreat, this quote can inspire participants to focus on their inner worlds.

More from Gaston Bachelard

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
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

A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all. ...The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being.
Huston SmithRead
The Cross isn't an ornament, mere symbol. It's the mystery of God's love, that He died for our sins.
Pope FrancisRead
Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.
Ninon De L'EnclosRead
Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
Alan WattsRead
Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
Henri BergsonRead
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
Aldous HuxleyRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.