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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
Gaston Bachelard
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Desire drives human actions more than mere survival needs.

This quote by Gaston Bachelard suggests that human beings are motivated more by their desires, aspirations, and passions than by their basic necessities. It implies that our wants and dreams shape our identities and actions, revealing a deeper aspect of human existence that transcends mere survival instincts.

Themes

DesireCreationMotivationHuman NaturePhilosophy

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about pursuing passion over safety nets.

More from Gaston Bachelard

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.
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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.
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