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An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

Gaston Bachelard

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 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
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
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
Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.
GASTON BACHELARD

Home Imagination Ourselves Room Space Symbol
When the image is new, the world is new.
GASTON BACHELARD

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

Away Connection Past Pull
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
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
GASTON BACHELARD

Dreams Expression Love Poet
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
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
The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
GASTON BACHELARD

Character Known Ourselves Progress
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

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

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An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

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