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
Reverie is commonly classified among the phenomena of psychic detente. It is lived out in a relaxed time which has no linking force. Since it functions with inattention, it is often without memory. It is a flight from out of the real that does not always find a consistent unreal world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reverie reflects a state of mind where one escapes reality into a dreamy, relaxed awareness devoid of strong memories.
Gaston Bachelard's quote explores the concept of reverie as a unique mental state characterized by a disengagement from the pressures of reality. It suggests that during such moments, individuals may experience a sense of timelessness and an absence of focused thought, allowing for a fluid transition between consciousness and imagination. This state, although disconnected from reality, does not necessarily lead to a coherent alternate worldview, highlighting the complexity of our mental processes when we drift into daydreams.
Themes
ReverieDreamImaginationRelaxationEscape
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about creativity, one could use this quote to illustrate how moments of daydreaming can inspire innovative ideas.
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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