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
“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
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge 220
English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834Related quotes
"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
“Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.”
Source: “Mathematical man” (1913), p. 41
“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”
Quoted in Robert Perceval Graves, The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Vol. 3 (1889), p. 219.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”
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.”
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.
As quoted in C.S. Lewis (1963), by Roger Lancelyn Green, p. 9