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
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The soul transcends time, finding peace in its imagination rather than in the past.
This quote by Gaston Bachelard suggests that the essence of the soul exists beyond the constraints of time, emphasizing that true rest and fulfillment come not from reminiscing about the past but from engaging with the boundless possibilities of imagination and reverie. It highlights the idea that our inner world and creativity can provide solace and depth, offering a refuge from the temporal nature of existence.
Themes
SoulImaginationTimeReveriePeace
In practice
Example use cases
During a meditation retreat, this quote can inspire participants to focus on their inner worlds.
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.
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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.
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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