Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

It is with logic that one proves; it is with intuition that one invents.

Before he has seen the whole, how unusually perceptive and imaginative the person must be to evolve the entire sequence by meditating on its single, pair or triplet of essential images.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

I'm a thinker.

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

I've always been interested in visualizing something, whether it's a memory or an idea you want to be true. I am a big believer in that. I'm constantly thinking of that. If I can't picture something, then it doesn't make sense to me.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.

Imagination is a form of seeing

Imagination is the will of things. . . .

Sense is never common.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.