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
Perhaps it is even a good idea to stir up a rivalry between conceptual and imaginative activity. In any case, one will encounter nothing but disappointments if he intends to make them cooperate. The image can not provide matter for a concept. By giving stability to the image, the concept would stifle its life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Conceptual and imaginative activities should not be forced to work together, as they serve different purposes.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that there is an inherent tension between conceptual thought and imaginative activity. He argues that while both are valuable, they cannot truly cooperate without losing their essential qualities. The image nurtures creativity and spontaneity, while the concept seeks definition and stability; their interplay can lead to disappointment if one attempts to force harmony between the two.
Themes
ImaginationConceptCreativityTensionPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a philosophy class to discuss the nature of creativity.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →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.
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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