Jacob Bronowski: Quotes about imagination

“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.”

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. …it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. …by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors.”

“To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.”

“When a child begins to play games… he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.”

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

“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.”

“[I]magination… is the faculty… the common root from which science and literature… spring and grow and flourish together. …the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts… [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another… without asking… to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. …When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible.”

“The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.”

“Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head… the rational manipulation… as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.”

“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.”

“When a child… discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. …seeing situations that do not exist. …in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. …play …frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world… They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them.”

“[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight… induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized.”

“All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"”

“To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements.”