Albert Einstein on more than one occasion explained the importance of imagination:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
He was by far not the only one that understood the power of imagination.
Colin Wilson wrote: “Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.”
Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way, people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
Ursula Le Guin argued: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
Elspeth Huxley wrote in her Memories of an African Childhood: “How much does one imagine, how much observe? One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water.”
Les Landes his marvelous book builds around the concept that “Imagination without free will has no power & Free will without imagination has no purpose.”
One of my favorite sentences in his book is:
The things you imagine are as real as the shoes on your feet.
I know where I want my shoes to take me. Where would you like your shoes to take you?
