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Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

Gaston Bachelard

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

Childhood Excess Germ Poem
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
It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Final Live Oneself State
He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.
GASTON BACHELARD

Accurate Learning Properly Teaching
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Fire Flare Forgot Ourselves
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
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreamer Dreams Night
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
GASTON BACHELARD

Creation Desire Difference Man Need
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
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
GASTON BACHELARD

Alive Beautiful Feeling Reading
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 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
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
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
One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARD

Build Home Live Oneself

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

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Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

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