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 live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that expressing life too well can detract from actually living it fully.
Gaston Bachelard's quote evokes the idea that a deep, authentic engagement with life often comes with a level of imperfection in expression. When one becomes too focused on articulating and expressing life's essence perfectly, they may lose the essence of life itself, indicating a paradox where over-analysis or over-articulation can hinder genuine experiences.
In practice
During a philosophy lecture discussing the nature of existence.
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.
As a global community, we face a choice. Do we want migration to be a source of prosperity and international solidarity, or a byword for inhumanity and social friction?
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky
In the maxims of the law, God is seen as the rewarder of perfect righteousness and the avenger of sin. But in Christ, His face shines out, full of grace and gentleness to poor, unworthy sinners.
When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.
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