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
It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Dreaming should be a vibrant and engaging experience rather than a dull escape from reality.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that true reverie or daydreaming should stimulate the mind and engage the subconscious rather than lead to a state of sleepiness or disengagement. His assertion that failing asleep might signify a decline in being raises questions about the nature of our thoughts and consciousness, urging us to strive for more profound reflections instead of allowing ourselves to drift into unthoughtful slumber.
Themes
DreamsConsciousnessReverieSubconsciousThoughts
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of creativity, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for active engagement in one's dreams.
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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