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
Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls.
Interpretation
This quote explores the connection between humanity and the world through the metaphor of alchemy and the balance of internal forces.
Gaston Bachelard's quote emphasizes the profound relationship between an individual's inner convictions and the external world. By describing alchemy as a 'problem of souls,' he suggests that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding involves a deep engagement with both one's own essence (animus and anima) and the larger universe, implying that our personal transformations are intertwined with the world's transformation.
In practice
In a discussion about personal growth, this quote can highlight the importance of inner belief systems.
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.
The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.
Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.
We have become dangerously comfortable- believers ooze with wealth and let their addictions to comfort and security numb the radical urgency of the gospel.
Truth and non-violence are not cloistered virtues but applicable as much in the forum and the legislatures as in the market place.
I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud.
My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.
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