Do you know who said that ?
If you do, great, but you can still keep on reading! ;)
If you don't, then I am going to try to make you guess instead of telling you the answer right away.
This way, you will understand why he said that, and why it is remarkable that he and not someone else did say that.
So, the quote speaks about imagination.
In the common sense, imagination is rather perceived as something unreal. The opposite from the real life where there is no room for immaterial or non tangible things.
Imagination is like an escape, it is usually only for dreamers.
Generally speaking though, imagination is perceived as quite positively by people because it is synonym of creation, art, beauty.
But few people estimate that it is really usefull. And even fewer think it is actually more usefull than knowledge.
Indeed, knowledge, is getting more and more important in our society. These are the brains, engineers, scientists, leaders, in short people who "know" that are useful in our society.
"Knowledge is power", everybody heard this sentence at least once.
So, it is difficult to think that a businessman, a politician or a bright scientist did say that. It seems... in complete contradiction with their domain of predilection.
If we had to guess the job of this person, we'd say that this person is an artist, an author, a poet, something like that.
Ok, you can guess where I am going here. The one who said that is not an artist at all. Or at least, he was not famous for its artistic talents. This person is acknowledged for its very important scientific discoveries. These discoveries are still very important in our every day life.
The man who said this is : Albert Einstein.
Yep.
Here is the full quote :
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.",
Albert Einstein.
So imagination embraces everything we don't understand, everything we cannot apprehend or perceive but that yet is here.
That is the great thing about imagination.
Now, I am sure you are not totally surprised for Einstein is known to be an original genius.
And he really did need to be original to be able to make the discoveries he did.
Because, when he arrived, at the beginning of the 20th century, science did not really need someone.
Newtonian mechanics was widely accepted at the time because it was working perfectly to predict planet positions in space etc.. There was just a few issues that bothered a few scientists but nothing really important.
Einstein, by taking a closer look at these slight issues put a finger on things that later completely changed the scientific landscape.
To me, it is just incredible that such a genius puts imagination before knowledge.
But if we look at other Einstein quotes, we understand it is not the only quote like this.
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
Here he explains that most of his discoveries have been done primarily through his intuition and then only he used his rational power of mind. But the trigger, the breakthrough was done with his intuition, his imagination.
The rational mind has become our god whereas it should only be our servant.
Contrary to what we could think, imagination has been mostly used in science, at least for Einstein discoveries.
So I just ask this question : if one of our greatest scientist openly says that he used his imagination and intuition to make bright discoveries, why do we still rely so much on our rational mind ?
Why don't we trust just a little more our imagination ?