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"Few people have the imagination for reality."
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"Reality is not enough for us, that's why we have invented art to create different realities!"

"The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."

"Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love--starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love."

"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."

"What if dragons breathed bubbles and purred when they cuddled and giggled at chivalrous knights for their troubles?What if dragons felt soft, having scales made of cloth,and they moved rather slow like a brown-throated sloth?What if dragons were shyand did easily crywhen confronted by characters callous and sly?What if dragons did goodbut were misunderstoodso men mercilessly slew the beasts right where they stood?What if dragons aren't missedbecause there is no listof extinct types of quarry that now don't exist?"

"Can you not see, that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

"Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child's bed."

"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."
Explore more quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."

"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome."

"We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them."

"The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool."

"A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness."

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

"Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."
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