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
One must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of living life fully rather than just settling for material comforts.
Gaston Bachelard's quote suggests that the primary purpose of existence is to experience life and derive meaning from it, rather than purely focusing on constructing a place or status in society. It highlights the notion that personal fulfillment and living with intention should come before material possessions or societal expectations.
Themes
LifePurposeMeaningExistenceIntention
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth, one might say, 'Remember, one must live to build one's house.'
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes βOf 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.
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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