88 quotes
Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
Dissent is the mark of freedom.
Science and Human Values (1956)
At bottom, we have remain individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.
Science and Human Values (1956)
What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and go on fitting what is new to what we have learnt before, piece by piece.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Of course, everyone is free to prefer his favourite article of faith to the scientific, that is the empirical method. But do not let us imagine that his faith is then anything except a piece of comfortable and customary superstition.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
Science and Human Values (1956)
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
World Authors 1950–1970 (1975)
We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Here is the ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the contents of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the world as well as in the laboratory.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
[War] is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that
We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
Science and Human Values (1956)
When a man counts one, two, three, he is not only doing mathematics, he is on the path to the mysticism of numbers in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler, to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.
The Imaginative Mind in Art (1978)
There has never been another moment in English history to equal the promise of that moment in the 1660’s when the Royal Society was formally founded. And though it was less dramatic elsewhere, it was a high moment throughout Europe.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes... because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things.
The Imaginative Mind in Art (1978)