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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Gaston Bachelard

Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!
GASTON BACHELARD

Small Story Word World
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
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Expression Love Poet
The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn’t really our solitude.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Life Live Load Ourselves Passion Remain Solitude Time
Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
GASTON BACHELARD

Growth Space Tree
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
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
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
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
One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARD

Build Home Live Oneself
Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream. There are calm beaches in the midst of nightmares.
GASTON BACHELARD

Calm Dreams Nightmare People
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
We must listen to poets.
GASTON BACHELARD

Listening One Liner Poet
An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Excess Germ Poem
A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
GASTON BACHELARD

Beautiful Book Fact Greatness Human Reading Service Togetherness
For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?
GASTON BACHELARD

Cosmos End Face Function Imagination Man

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

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