"Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge" - An over-quoted quotation. Here's why its true though.

I started posting my notes on Quine's "Methods of Logic" online. I will finish someday. Anyway I was skimming it and found a quotation and a comment on it worth sharing over here on this blog:

We must be able to think up schemata which imply or are implied by a given schema and promise well as links in a proposed chain of argument. Such products can be checked mechanically by truth-value analysis, but thinking them up is an unmechanical activity.

-p. 47

It brings to mind the worn-out quotation of Einstein, "Imagination is more important than knowledge". Here, even in the midst of pursuing the discipline of meticulous, exhaustive, systematic, and well-defined logical analyses, we see the glory of knack and of imagination and of art.