
“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
Source: Posted on instagram @angelovulpini, September 2nd, 2021.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTVVtsfrRvh/
“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
Source: Patriotism and Christianity http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Christianity (1896), Ch. 17
Context: No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion.
And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.
“Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality.”
A comment on Wrong Questions http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/ (March 2008)
Context: Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Report on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution (c. 1846)
Mysterious Answers To Mysterious Questions http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_questions/ (August 2007); Yudkowsky credits the map/territory analogy to physicist/statistician Edwin Thompson Jaynes.
Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203
“The sense of existence is the greatest happiness.”
Part 3, Chapter 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Contarini Fleming (1832)
“A man who prays lives out the mystery of existence, and a man who does not pray scarcely exists.”
Love is a Radiant Light: The Life & Words of Saint Charbel (2019)