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
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the idea that children find solace and a sense of belonging in solitude, away from adult complexities.
Gaston Bachelard's quote explores the contrast between the unhappiness often imposed on children by adult society and the peace they can find in solitude. It suggests that, when freed from the burdens and expectations of the human world, a child can connect with the universe and experience a sense of being at one with everything around them, highlighting the purity and depth of a child's inner life.
Themes
ChildhoodSolitudeHappinessUniverseCosmos
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about mental health for children, one could reflect on how solitude allows for healing.
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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