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, … - Gaston Bachelard

That beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers, and glittering streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the thing that impresses us most, and which we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the space of the scene it occupies, as a piece of gossamer on a near-at-hand bush, nor in any wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but because the gossamer is known by us for a little bit of spider’s work, and the other grey film is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high, inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it, and yet all the while the thoughts and knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them.

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

But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion.