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

Gaston Bachelard

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Awake Consciousness Fall Harmony Poetic Record
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 BACHELARD

Adult Animation Childhood Finding Life Permanent Return
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
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
GASTON BACHELARD

Description Object Slave Subject
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARD

Benefit Dreams Home Peace Protection
Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.
GASTON BACHELARD

Confidence Function Imagination Proper Thankful World
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Fiction Greatness Ourselves Poetry Situation
Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Imagination Ourselves Room Space Symbol
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.
GASTON BACHELARD

Desire Poet Reading Temptations Writing
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
GASTON BACHELARD

Experience Image Imagination Kill
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
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD

Love Preparation Soul Sweet
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
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
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHELARD

Creation Desire Difference Man Need
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak… It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Born Fact Hesitate Lying Ourselves Silence Source Suffering Talk

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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