black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Excess Germ Poem
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
GASTON BACHELARD

Children Event Life World
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
GASTON BACHELARD

Addition Book Day Expression Life
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
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
GASTON BACHELARD

Gift Mindset Soul Time
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
Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?
GASTON BACHELARD

Action Imagination Perception Reality
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
All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.
GASTON BACHELARD

Knowledge Philosophy Question Science
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
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
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
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Fire Flare Forgot Ourselves
At all times and in all fields the explanation by fire is a rich explanation.
GASTON BACHELARD

Explanation Fire Rich Time
Our house is our corner of the world.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Ourselves Perspective 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 metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
GASTON BACHELARD

Alive Beautiful Feeling Reading
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD

Love Preparation Soul Sweet
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
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHELARD

Creation Desire Difference Man Need
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Final Live Oneself State
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
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
GASTON BACHELARD

Date Determination Intimacy Knowledge Local Space Urgent
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
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
GASTON BACHELARD

Description Object Slave Subject
The words of the world want to make sentences.
GASTON BACHELARD

Sentence Word World

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Gaston Bachelard Quotes