"The aim of our secret society must be to scare.  Not evil, because that's necessary for producing good (evil is, so to speak, the midwife of good)—no, we want to scare away stupidity.  Is the devil stupid?  Certainly not.  The devil is evil, evil is creative.  Stupidity, on the other hand, is the death of all creativeness.  The worst of all sins!  And it's all-powerful.  Accident and crime can both be laid to its account.  Stupidity means a lack of the most important quality of all—not reason, because stupid people are quite capable of being reasonable—no, stupidity means a complete lack of imagination." —Ernst Kreuder, The Attic Pretenders

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

"'Creation,' like 'creative,' is one of those hypnotic words which are prone to cast a spell upon the understanding and dissolve our thinking into a haze.  And out of this nebulous state of the intellect springs a strange but widely prevalent idea.  The shaping spirit of imagination sits aloof, like God as he is commonly conceived, creating in some thaumaturgic fashion out of nothing its visionary world.  That and that only is deemed to be 'originality'—that, and not the imperial moulding of old matter into imperishably new forms.  The ways of creation are wrapt in mystery; we may only marvel, and bow the head."  —John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 1927