“I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.”

Letter to his brother (1791).
Letters

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so langu…" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220
English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834

Related quotes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.
Letter to his brother (1791)
Letters

Clive Staples Lewis photo

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

Robert Musil photo

“Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

Source: “Mathematical man” (1913), p. 41

Augustus De Morgan photo

“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Quoted in Robert Perceval Graves, The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Vol. 3 (1889), p. 219.

Jorge Luis Borges photo

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Variant: I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

“The great advances in mathematics have not been made by logic but by creative imagination.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)
Context: Logical analysis is indispensable for an examination of the strength of a mathematical structure, but it is useless for its conception and design. The great advances in mathematics have not been made by logic but by creative imagination.

“If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 117

Stephen Crane photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

As quoted in C.S. Lewis (1963), by Roger Lancelyn Green, p. 9

Related topics