Imagination
Overview
 
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding
Understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object....

 to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world, and it also plays a key role in the learning
Learning
Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

 process.
Quotations

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume, Book 1, Section 4, p.225

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers by Richard Rorty, Volume 3, 1998.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

The true function of logic,... as applied to matters of experience,... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Poetry and Imagination by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1872.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Introduction to Men at War by Ernest Hemingway, 1942.

There is no life I knowthat compares to pure imaginationLiving there you'll be freeif you truly wish to be

Pure Imagination|Pure Imagination by Gene Wilder, 1971.

Impossibility is only the figment of an insufficient imagination.

The Song Of Sin by Phil Duncan, 1998.

 
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