"Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)
"The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth." (Carl G Jung, "Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation", 1921)
"In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought." (Jean Piaget, "The Moral Judgment of the Child", 1932)
"Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker." (John R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", 1939/1947)
"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination." (Carl G Jung, "The practice of psychotherapy", 1954)
"[Science fiction is] that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell", 1960)
"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable." (Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive", 1962)
"Fantasy is an expansive force in a person's life - it reaches and stretches beyond the immediate people environment or event which may otherwise contain him. [...]. Sometimes these extensions (fantasy) can gather such great force and poignancy that they achieve a presence which is more compelling than some real-life situations." (Erving Polster & Miriam Polster, "Gestalt Therapy Integrated", 1973)
"Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in our experience of sensory data. Fantasy, for example, allows us to prepare for experiences which we may have before they occur. People will distort present reality when rehearsing a speech which they will later present. It is this process which has made possible all the artistic creations which we as humans have produced." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)
"Because feeling does not have a form; it has to be treated like an inner sensation which can only be understood in terms of the images it triggers. These images do not, however, represent the feeling as such, for they are independently existing representations or fantasies that are merely associated at the moment of pleasure or pain." (Angelika Rauch, "The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant", 2000)
"Do not confuse fantasy with imagination: the former consumes itself in daydreaming, the latter stimulates creativity in the arts and in the sciences." (Fausto Cercignani, "Examples of self-translation", cca. 2004)
"A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still." (Ginette Paris, "Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After Neuroscience", 2013)
"Content without method leads to fantasy; method without content to empty sophistry; matter without form to unwieldy erudition, form without matter to hollow speculation." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Scientific Studies", Collected Works Vol. 12)
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