A Quote by Vilhjalmur Stefansson

There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Quote Topics

Arctic Imaginary Kinds Most Problems Real Two

Quote Author

Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Canadian - Explorer
November 3, 1879 - August 26, 1962

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents' Night.

Beverly Cleary

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another.

Ambrose Bierce

One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?

Stephen Hawking

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.

Rebecca Solnit

Since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions.

Richard Bandler

The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained ... all existing thing are ... imaginary.

Gregg Braden

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Kurt Vonnegut

Art is real and imaginary, two worlds rolled into one - the fulfillment of the artist's insatiable soul.

Edward J. Fraughton

In the 1920s the young English physicist Paul Dirac began trying to understand and describe the space-time evolution of the electron, the first elementary particle discovered by J.J. Thomson in 1897. Dirac was puzzled by an unprecedented property of space-time, discovered by Lorentz in his studies of electromagnetic forces, whereby if space was real, time had to be imaginary, and vice versa. In other words, space and time had to be a ‘complex’ mixture of two quantities, one real and the other imaginary.

Antonino Zichichi

Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't. But you can't tell the difference when you have no real information. Fear can create even more imaginary obstacles than ignorance can. That's why the smallest step away from speculation and into reality can be an amazing relief...The Reality Solution means: Do it before you're ready.

Barbara Sher

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Alain Badiou

From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.

Brian Stableford

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Simone Weil

Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion.