Science begins with the world ...

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.
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 Northrop Frye

Quotes from the same author

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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 Northrop Frye
Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.
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 Northrop Frye
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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 Northrop Frye
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
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 Northrop Frye
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
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 Northrop Frye