Imagination - Quotes
Faith, imagination and intuition are decisive factors in the progress of science as in any other human activity.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
A lady`s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!