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
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
Interpretation
Imagining holds more value than mere observation, as reality can diminish the essence of experiences.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that the act of verifying or experiencing images can strip them of their awe and mystique, leading to a less fulfilling interaction with the world. He proposes that the imagination allows us to create richer narratives and meanings than what we can derive from direct experiences, emphasizing the importance of creativity and perception in shaping our understanding of reality.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of creativity in education, one could use this quote to emphasize the power of imagination.
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.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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.
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.
I have seen a thousand times that Angels are human form, or men, for I have conversed with them as man to man, sometimes with one alone, sometimes with many in company.
The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
Religions are founded by what mystics say when they come back; but what the mystics say is not the same as what happened to them.
To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
If we were able to live at the level of the soul all the time, there would be no need for hindsight to appreciate the great truths of life.
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