“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.”

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

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 "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them." by Wallace Stevens?
Wallace Stevens photo
Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955

Related quotes

John Lancaster Spalding photo

“The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 246

Max Horkheimer photo
Gottlob Frege photo
Max Müller photo

“History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education before, in the fullness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity. All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth could meet with ready acceptance.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Source: History of Ancient Sanksrit Literature (1860) p.32
Context: History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education before, in the fullness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity. All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth could meet with ready acceptance. The ancient religions of the world were but the milk of nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by the bread of life.... The religion of Buddha has spread far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, and to our limited vision, it may seem to have retarded the advent of Christianity among a large portion of the human race. But in the sight of Him with whom a thousand years are but as one day, that religion, like the ancient religions of the world, may have but served to prepare the way of Christ, by helping through its very errors to strengthen and to deepen the ineradicable yearning of the human heart after the truth of God.

Michel Henry photo
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)

John Keats photo

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination — what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Alan Moore photo

Related topics