9 quotes
Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Opus Posthumous (1957)
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)