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
All quotes βOf 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
He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
Samuel JohnsonRead
Because he (the Sage) opposes no one, no one in the world can oppose him.
LaoziRead
In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole - a whole which can be identified by everyone who is part of it.
Christopher AlexanderRead
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.
Sam HarrisRead
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
George OrwellRead
I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacrifice the things dearest to me in pursuit of this quest. Even if the sacrifice demanded my very life, I hope I may be prepared to give it.
Mahatma GandhiRead