Nicole Oresme: Quotes about imagination

Nicole Oresme was French philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on imagination.
Nicole Oresme: 14   quotes 0   likes

“People marvel at … things only because they rarely happen; but the causes for these are as apparent as for others … For example, at night a fearful man who sees a wolf in the fields, or a cat in his room, will immediately assert and judge that it is an enemy or a devil … because he fixes his imagination on these and fears them. And a person devout and rapt [in ecstasy] will judge that it is an angel … A vigorous imagining of a retained species, then, together with a small external appearance or with an imbalance of some internal disposition … produces marvelous appearances in healthy as well as in sick people.”

Nicole Oresme

Nicole Oresme and The Marvels of Nature, Bert Hansen's translation (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), p. 73.
De causis mirabilium (c. 1370)

People , Fear , Angels , Imagination

“Every measurable thing except numbers is imagined in the manner of a continuous quantity. Therefore, for the mensuration of such a thing, it is necessary that points, lines, and surfaces, or their properties, be imagined. For in them… measure or ratio is initially found… Therefore, every intensity which can be acquired successively ought to be imagined by a straight line perpendicularly erected on some point of the space or subject of the intensible thing, e. g., a quality… And since the quantity or ratio of lines is better known and is more readily conceived by us—nay the line is in the first species of continua, therefore such intensity ought to be imagined by lines… Therefore, equal intensities are designated by equal lines, a double intensity by a double line, and always in the same way if one proceeds proportionally.”

Nicole Oresme

Tractatus de Configurationibus et Qualitatibus et Motuum (c. 1350)

Way , Imagination , Success

“God in His infinite grandeur without any quantity and absolutely indivisible, which we call immensity, is necessarily all in every extension or space or place which exists or can be imagined.”

Nicole Oresme

Book II, Ch. 2, p. 279.
Le livre du ciel et du monde (1377)

God , Imagination