#though

Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. ↗

— Iris Murdoch

#imagination

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven. ↗

— Francis Beaumont

#companions #earth #faith #fly #heaven

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. ↗

— J.M.G. Le Clézio

#thought #imagination

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#pleasure #thought #imagination

We're all entitled to our different likes and dislikes. Imagine the world if we all liked the same things. ↗

— Malia Ann Haberman

#chase-tinker #ideas #imagination #magic #thoughts

Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind. ↗

— George MacDonald

#thought #imagination

Time is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling. ↗

— John Draper

#depends #duration #feeling #nothing #rate

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. ↗

— Joan D. Vinge

#beyond #both #climb #compelled #enjoy

Thoughts are slippery fish in a cold shallow stream. If you are intent on capturing a worthwhile one, you need to stand very still, focus very hard on somewhere outside yourself, and then simply ignore it until it gets so close that it tickles your ankles. Then, pounce. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#slippery #stream #thoughts #inspirational

War is essential for peace ↗

— Ram Mohan

#inspiration #irony #peace #though #war