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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

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.
GASTON BACHELARD

Comfortable Memories Ourselves Protection
The words of the world want to make sentences.
GASTON BACHELARD

Sentence Word World
The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.
GASTON BACHELARD

Act Direct Image Origin
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Away Connection Past Pull
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
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
The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.
GASTON BACHELARD

Better Clever Myself Possession World
Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.
GASTON BACHELARD

Escape Project Separate Situation Society Stability State Time Tranquility 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
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
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
Man is an imagining being.
GASTON BACHELARD

Imagination Man One Liner
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
GASTON BACHELARD

Experience Image Imagination Kill
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
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
GASTON BACHELARD

Destiny Future Image Language Oneself Poetry Speech
Childhood lasts all through life.
GASTON BACHELARD

Childhood Life One Liner
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
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
When the image is new, the world is new.
GASTON BACHELARD

Image New World
The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
GASTON BACHELARD

Allow Dreams Home Peace Protection
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
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
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD

Love Preparation Soul Sweet
One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.
GASTON BACHELARD

Build Home Live Oneself
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
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

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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