#imagination

Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better. ↗

— Irving Kirsch

#history #treatments #imagination

We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#relationships #imagination

My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter. ↗

— Gary Reilly

#humor #imagination #writer-s-block #writing #imagination

It was hard to imagine him sneaking around and leaving a rose on anyone's doormat, but I guess boys will surprise you sometimes. ↗

— Rebecca Stead

#imagination

Socrate considérait que c'est un mal qui n'est pas loin de la folie, de s'imaginer que l'on possède une vertu, alors qu'on ne la possède pas. Certes, une pareille illusion est plus dangereuse que l'illusion contraire qui consiste à croire que l'on souffre d'un défaut, d'un vice. Deuxième Considération intempestive, ch. 6 ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#vice #virtue #imagination

Ted: A fucking good poem is a weapon. It's-- and not like a-- a popgun or something. - It's a bomb. It's like a bloody big bomb. Sylvia: That’s why they make children learn them in school. They don't want them messing about with them on their own. I mean, just imagine if a sonnet went off accidentally. Boom. ↗

— John Brownlow

#imagination

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference. ↗

— Robert Coles

#story #value #imagination

To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one. ↗

— Alicia Suskin Ostriker

#imagination

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God. ↗

— N. Scott Momaday

#imagination