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
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.
In practice
During a meditation retreat, this quote can inspire participants to focus on their inner worlds.
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.
To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.
It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it's like to try to speak from under water when you're drowned?
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
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