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
Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Imagination embodies growth and connection, much like a tree, linking different realms of existence.
Gaston Bachelard's quote emphasizes the expansive and integrative nature of imagination, likening it to a tree rooted in both earth and sky. It suggests that imagination transcends mere thought; it has the power to connect diverse realities and embodies a universal essence, reflecting the complexity and beauty of existence as we know it.
Themes
ImaginationTreeGrowthCosmosUniverse
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech about creativity in education.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of 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
Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves.
Henrik IbsenRead
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
Sigmund FreudRead
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
Frank HerbertRead
There are four things that we ought to do with the Word of God - admit it as the Word of God, commit it to our hearts and minds, submit to it, and transmit it to the world.
William WilberforceRead
Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence MckennaRead
A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.
Eric HofferRead