"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 Philosophy See all quotes by Gaston Bachelard →

React to this quote

More by Gaston Bachelard

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”

“Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

“Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.”

“True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.”

“Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.”

“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual, and the unsat…"

— Thomas Ligotti

Literature1953

#life

"A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by mea…"

— Mircea Eliade

Literature1907–1986

#life

"The only voice which was heard against this nation-wide exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi in the field of medieval Indian history, was that of the veteran historian, R.C. Majumdar. For him, …"

— Sita Ram Goel

Literature1921–2003

#life

"Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, "How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?"

— Plutarch

Philosophy

#life