From: Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Albert Einstein)
From: Tremendous Trifles
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Often paraphrased as: "Fairy tales are more than true -- not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."
(C.K. Chesterton)
From: American Gods
I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
(Neil Gaiman)
From: One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock
His head swam with religions: the weekend was now given to the intricate patterns and language of Judaism; each week-day morning to the wood-scented, stained-glass solemnities of the Church of England; and the nights belonged to his own religion, the one he made up for himself, a strange, multicoloured pantheon in which the Lords of Chaos (Arioch, Xiombarg and the rest) rubbed shoulders with the Phantom Stranger from the DC Comics and Sam the trickster-Buddha from Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and vampires and talking cats and ogres, and all the things from the Lang coloured Fairy books: in which all mythologies existed simultaneously, in a magnificent anarchy of belief.
Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret), his belief in Narnia. From the age of six — for half his life — he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon, and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion, was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul, on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon…
This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.
Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualism; it was not that Richard had any problems with believing in ghosts — Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything — but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.
(Neil Gaiman)
From House, MD - You Don't Want To Know (Ep. 4.08)
If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder.
***
HOUSE: Looks like an envelope with the results of the genetic test for Huntington's inside.
THIRTEEN: Did you look?
HOUSE: I thought it'd be fun to find out together.
THIRTEEN: I don't want to know.
HOUSE: No, you're afraid to know.
THIRTEEN: I might die. So could you, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The only difference is you don't have to know about it today, so why should I?
HOUSE: I don't have to know the lottery numbers, but if someone offered them to me, I'd take them.
THIRTEEN: You spend your whole life looking for answers. Because you think the next answer will change something, maybe make you a little less miserable. And you know that when you run out of questions, you don't just run out of answers, you run out of hope. You glad you know that?
Thirteen leaves. House thinks for a few seconds then drops the envelope in the bin unopened.
(Writer: Sara Hess)
From an online debate:
Knowledge is the building blocks for imagination.
(Anonymous Poster)
[I've reblogged this verbatim from www.minderella.com since that blog no longer exists. -FF]
The following is an excerpt from S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The "Good Parts" Version Abridged by William Goldman. This is included in my web page for the truth it holds, so William Goldman, if you're reading this (or anyone, for that matter, from his publishing company) please don't sue me for copywright infringement. And for everyone else, if you have not seen "The Princess Bride," rent it this week, and if you have not read the story, read it because William Goldman just did a magnificent job with this book. And for all the fantasy-filled life this story evokes, at the heart of it, the story is quite realistic, and Morgenstern (and Goldman) never loses sight of that fact. Now read:
It's one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you're ten is that, no matter what, there's gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out. And Westley and Buttercup - well, they had their troubles, sure, but they were going to get married and live happily ever after, I would have bet the family fortune if I'd found a sucker big enough to take me on.
Well, when my father got through with that sentence where the wedding was sandwiched between the ministers' meeting and the treasury whatever, I said, "You read that wrong."
My father's this little old barber - remember that too? And kind of illiterate. Well, you just don't challenge a guy who has trouble reading and say he's read something incorrectly, because that's really threatening. "I'm doing the reading," he said.
"I know that, but you got it wrong. She doesn't marry that rotten Humperdinck. She marries Westley."
"It says right here," my father began, a little huffy, and he starts going over it again.
"You must have skipped a page then. Something. Get it right, huh?"
By now he was more than a tiny bit upset. "I skipped nothing. I read the words. The words are there, I read them, good night," and off he went.
"Hey please, no," I called after him, but he's stubborn, and, next thing, my mother was in saying, "Your father says his throat is too sore; I told him not to read so much," and she tucked and fluffed me and no matter how I battled, it was over. No more story till the next day.
I spent that whole night thinking Buttercup married Humperdink. It just rocked me. How can I explain it, but the world didn't work that way. Good got attracted to good, evil you flushed down the john and that was that. But their marriage - I couldn't make it jibe. God, did I work at it. First I thought that probably Buttercup had this fantastic effect on Humperdinck and turned him into a kind of Westley, or maybe Westley and Humperdinck turned out to be long-lost brothers and Humperdinck was so happy to get his brother back he said, "Look, Westley, I didn't realize who you were when I married her so what I'll do is I'll divorce her and you marry her and that way we'll all be happy." To this day I don't think I was ever more creative.
But it didn't take. Something was wrong and I couldn't lose it. Suddenly there was this discontent gnawing away until it had a place big enough to settle in and then it curled up and stayed there and it's still inside me lurking as I write this now.
The next night, when my father went back to reading and the marriage turned out to have been Buttercup's dream, I screamed, "I knew it, all along I knew it," and my father said, "So you're happy now, it's all right now, we can please continue?" and I said, "Go," and he did.
But I wasn't happy. Oh my ears were happy, I guess, my story sense was happy, my heart too, but in my, I suppose you have to call it "soul," there was that damn discontent, shaking its dark head. All this was never explained to me till I was in my teens and there was this great woman who lived in my home town, Edith Neisser, dead now, and she wrote terrific books about how we screw up our children - "Brothers and Sisters" was one of her books, "The Eldest Child" was another. Published by Harper. Edith doesn't need the plug, seeing, like I said, as she's no longer with us, but if there are any amongst you who are worried that maybe you're not being perfect parents, pick up one of Edith's books while there's still time. I knew her 'cause her kid Ed got his haircuts from my pop, and she was this writer and by my teens I knew, secretly, that was the life for me too, except I couldn't tell anybody. It was too embarrassing - barber's sons, if they hustled, maybe got to be IBM salesmen, but writers? No way. Don't ask me how, but eventually Edith discovered my shhhhhh ambition and from then on, sometimes, we would talk. And I remember once we were having iced tea on the Neisser porch and talking and just outside the porch was their badminton court and I was watching some kids play badminton and Ed had just shellacked me, and as I left the court for the porch, he said, "Don't worry, it'll all work out, you'll get me next time" and I nodded, and then Ed said, "And if you don't, you'll beat me at something else."
I went to the porch and sipped iced tea and Edith was reading this book and she didn't put it down when she said, "That's not necessarily true, you know."
I said, "How do you mean?"
And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be." Would you believe that for me right then it was like one of those comic books where the light bulb goes on over Mandrake the Magician's head?
"It isn't!" I said, so loud I really startled her. "You're right! It's not fair." I was so happy if I'd known how to dance, I'd have started dancing. "Isn't that great, isn't it terrific?" I think along here Edith must have thought I was well on my way to being bonkers.
But it meant so much to me to have it said and out and free and flying - that was the discontent I had endured the night my father stopped reading, I realized right then. That was the reconciliation I was trying to make and couldn't.
And that's what I think this book's about. All those Columbia experts can spiel all they want about the delicious satire; they're crazy. This book says, "life's not fair" and I'm telling you, one and all, you better believe it. I got a fat spoiled son - he's not gonna nag Miss Rheingold. And he's always gonna be fat, even if he gets skinny he'll still be fat and he'll still be spoiled and life will never be enough to make him happy, and that's my fault maybe - make it all my fault, if you want - the point is, we're not created equal, for the rich they sing, life isn't fair. I got a cold wife; she's brilliant, she's stimulating, she's terrific; there's no love; that's okay too, just so long as we don't keep expecting everything to somehow even out for us before we die.
Look. (Grownups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming up, torture you've already been prepared for, but there's worse. There's death coming up, and you better understand this: Some of the wrong people die. Be ready for it. This isn't Curious George Uses the Potty. Nobody warned me and it was my own fault (you'll see what I mean in a little) and that was my mistake, so I'm not letting it happen to you. The wrong people die, some of them, and the reason is this; life is not fair. Forget all the garbage your parents put out. Remember Morgenstern. You'll be a lot happier.
