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
Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.
Interpretation
The quote explores the idea of idealization and how dreams influence our perception of love and self.
Gaston Bachelard's quote reflects on the complex process of idealization, suggesting that our dreams and memories intertwine to shape how we perceive and ultimately love others. Rather than merely recalling past experiences, it emphasizes the importance of actively dreaming and envisioning the values of who we love, indicating that this idealized version sustains our aspirations and shapes our identity.
In practice
A speaker might use this quote in a talk about the power of dreams in shaping our identities.
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'm quite a neurotic thinker, quite an adrenalized person. But after meditation, I felt this beautiful serenity and selfless connection.
There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.
True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
No one is helped when cultural critics use their voices irresponsibly.
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.