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
Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote speaks to the power of words as sources of comfort and inspiration during turbulent times.
Gaston Bachelard reflects on the profound impact that words can have on our lives, particularly when we seek solace from the chaos around us. He suggests that a single word can embody hope, growth, and a sense of security, acting as both a dawn signaling new beginnings and a shelter offering protection and peace. By highlighting the importance of language, Bachelard emphasizes how words can nurture our spirit and provide clarity, especially amidst life's oscillations.
Themes
WordsComfortGrowthLifeShelterInspiration
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literature, one might say, 'As Gaston Bachelard reminds us, words can be our refuge, helping us navigate through life's challenges.'
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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