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One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Gaston Bachelard

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
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.
GASTON BACHELARD

Conscious Listening Oneself Truth
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
When the image is new, the world is new.
GASTON BACHELARD

Image New World
The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.
GASTON BACHELARD

Evidence Intimate Possible Thirst True Water
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
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Clever Myself Possession World
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
GASTON BACHELARD

Expression Life Live Oneself Philosophy Poor Understand
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
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
GASTON BACHELARD

Corrective Hope Ideas Invention Repeat
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
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
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
GASTON BACHELARD

Beautiful Born Existence Kind Language Special
The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARD

Allow Dreams Home Peace Protection
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
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

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

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One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

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