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
Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Scientific work requires both theoretical reasoning and experimental validation for credibility.
Gaston Bachelard emphasizes the interdependent relationship between theory and experimentation in science. He argues that to establish credibility, any scientific endeavor must move beyond theoretical frameworks and undergo experimental testing, suggesting that experiments validate arguments and theoretical constructs find support through empirical evidence.
Themes
ScienceExperimentTheoryCredibilityValidation
In practice
Example use cases
During a science conference, one could mention this quote to stress the importance of experimental data in scientific discussions.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes βOf 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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