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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

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
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
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
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
GASTON BACHELARD

Help History Liberty Name Original Ourselves Return Solitude Spiritual
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Cosmos Happiness Human Man Peace Solitude Son World
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Fiction Greatness Ourselves Poetry Situation
The blank page gives us the right to dream.
GASTON BACHELARD

Blank Dreams Page Right
We understand nature by resisting it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Nature One Liner Resistance Understand
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
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
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreamer Infinity Transportation World
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
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
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

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.

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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.

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