“ It is a mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious world’s wonder. ”
Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897). copy citation
| Author | Mark Twain |
|---|---|
| Source | Following the Equator |
| Topic | imagination mistake |
| Date | 1897 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm |
Context
“and so, I ought never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus preserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is a mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious world’s wonder.
I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj’s place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man’s supremest possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature’s supremest possibility in the combination of those same qualities.”
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