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
In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Awareness enhances our consciousness and contributes to our growth as individuals.
Gaston Bachelard emphasizes that every moment of awareness leads to an elevation of consciousness, representing a continuous growth that may go unnoticed due to its rapidity. He argues that consciousness is an essential human activity, suggesting that our ability to be aware plays a fundamental role in shaping our experience and understanding of existence.
Themes
AwarenessConsciousnessGrowthHuman ExperiencePsychic Coherence
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on personal development at a conference, one might say, 'As Bachelard points out, each moment of awareness contributes to our consciousness.'
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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