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
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that deep reflection allows us to transcend our past and rediscover our authentic selves.
In this quote, Gaston Bachelard reflects on the power of deep reverie and solitude as a means of self-discovery. He emphasizes that through profound contemplation, we can detach ourselves from our past identities and societal labels, leading us to a more genuine and original state of being. This process of delving into our inner thoughts provides liberation and a chance to understand who we truly are beyond our history.
Themes
ReverieSolitudeSelf-DiscoveryLiberationReflection
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a speech on personal growth and introspection.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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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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