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
Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!
Interpretation
What this quote means
True happiness may come from deep connections formed in silence.
Gaston Bachelard's quote suggests that genuine happiness can be found in the shared, unspoken moments of connection with others. The 'silent vigils' represent deep, meaningful interactions where words are unnecessary, highlighting the profound bond that can exist between souls even in silence. This appreciation for quiet companionship reflects the idea that our most intimate relationships often speak louder than words.
Themes
HappinessSilenceConnectionSoulsVigils
In practice
Example use cases
During a thoughtful discussion on friendship, one might say, 'Happy is the man who knows...'
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.
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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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