quote · Source-linked selection
The imagination is a fine faculty; yet I like not when she works on what has actually happened; the airy forms she creates are welcome as things of their own kind; but uniting with reality she produces often nothing but monsters, and seems to me, in such cases, to fly into direct variance with reason and common-sense.
The imagination is a fine faculty; yet I like not when she works on what has actually happened; the airy forms she creates are welcome as things of their own kind; but uniting with reality she produces often nothing but monsters, and seems to me, in such cases, to fly into direct variance with reason and common-sense.
Approximate author period: c. 1790 AD · early modern
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- Author or tradition
- Goethe
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1790 AD · early modern
author lifetime midpoint (1749–1832)
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Dictionary of Quotations (1893) (1893 AD)
Printed citation: Goethe. · page_436
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The voice behind the words.
Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.
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