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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
ImaginationExperiencePerceptionRealityCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the importance of creativity in education, one could use this quote to emphasize the power of imagination.
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
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