Evangelista Torricelli Quotes

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

Imagination is the air of mind.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Because of the many dimensions of forms of though which you can also put into physical form, you have the possibility to create much which we cannot fashion in the same manner.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

Intellectuals are people who manage the world in their head. They look at life and try to see some kind of truth, and if they cannot find it, they attempt to create it.

I don't need to move my body. I need to move my ideas.

The truth is, the less a subject had to do with the visible world, the more talented I was at solving problems.

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

[Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention.

Books think for me. I can read anything which I call a book.

I have never been able to understand anyone on this planet who lacks a need for knowledge. Is it not God's greatest gift to us all, this capacity to think, to wonder, to imagine?

To understand is to invent.

Wit is the Fruitful Womb where Thoughts conceive.

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.

Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere .

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.

The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the boarders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, 'The imagination is the stuff of the intellect' -affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works.

I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives--philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

Vernon Reis opened the world to me through books. He taught me that while I was physically firmly planted in blue-collar Auburn, Washington in the 50s and early 60s, intellectually I could go anywhere, explore anything, and sample exciting new ideas simply by opening a book.

A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.