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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

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
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
The night dreamer cannot articulate a cogito. The night dream is a dream without a dreamer.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreamer Dreams Night
Childhood lasts all through life.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Life One Liner
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
Any comparison diminishes the expressive qualities of the terms of the comparison.
GASTON BACHELARD

Comparison Diminish Quality Term
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
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
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
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
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
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
One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARD

Build Home Live Oneself
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
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
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

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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