Louie

I've been reading books by Susan Wittig Albert, and found this wonderful quote in The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, the third book in the collection of The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter Mysteries.

She believed (or wanted to believe, which came to the same thing) that real fairies lived amongst the real creatures of the real forests and fields, and that even though she might not have been lucky enough to see them on her last visit to the garden or the woods, she was bound to see them the next time, or the next, or the next. If she believed, there was always hope.

Grown up at last and required to live all day long in the real world, it now seemed to Beatrix that imaginary fairies were of a great deal more use than real ones. And I think we must agree with her on that score.

It is undeniably true that the imagination is far more powerful than knowledge, and that it is much more important to believe in something than to know it! There is, after all, a limit to the things we can know (even if we are fortunate enough to be geniuses), but no limit whatsoever to the things we might imagine. And if we cannot imagine, we will never know what we have yet to learn, for imagination shows us what is possible before knowledge leads us to what is true.