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To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

Gaston Bachelard

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Cosmos Happiness Human Man Peace Solitude Son World
The reflected world is the conquest of calm.
GASTON BACHELARD

Calm Reflection World
A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
GASTON BACHELARD

Breathe Conscience Empty Man Myself
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
GASTON BACHELARD

Help History Liberty Name Original Ourselves Return Solitude Spiritual
The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
GASTON BACHELARD

Happiness Illusion Image Live Nourish Sweet
When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing… And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Adult Children Lost See Thinking World
Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
GASTON BACHELARD

Small Story Word World
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Character Known Ourselves Progress
Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dedication Dream Green Imagination Meadow River
Man is an imagining being.
GASTON BACHELARD

Imagination Man One Liner
By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD

Children Dreamer Listening Sea Word World
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.
GASTON BACHELARD

Distance Edge Imagination Live Past Soul Time Universe
To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.
GASTON BACHELARD

Destiny Disappear Finding Infinity Nature Water
Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Children Cover Imagination Ourselves Possible Solitary
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
GASTON BACHELARD

Expression History Lost Poet Poetry Reality

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

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To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

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