Echoes

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence of those men's wits, that have received and held it to be true, and with the sprightliness of their judgments offered such violence to their own senses, as that they have been able to prefer that which their reason dictated to them, to that which sensible experiments represented most manifestly to the contrary. ...I cannot find any bounds for my admiration, how that reason was able in Aristarchus and Copernicus, to commit such a rape on their senses, as in despite thereof to make herself mistress of their credulity.

I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A thought comes when 'it' wishes, and not when 'I' wish.

"We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy, inquisition the progress, ignorance the end.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.

Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations...

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.