When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein.
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.-- Albert Einstein.
I encountered these two quotations in Graham Joyce's excellent novel SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE. Both quotations appear on the Net, which does not necessarily mean that Einstein said those precise words, given the many ways in which celebrity figures are frequently misquoted.
But if one could prove definitively that Albert Einstein, a genius in the realm of the physical sciences expressed these unbounded sentiments in favor of unrestrained fantasy-- what would that mean?
My guess is that Einstein felt that fantasy enlarged the scope of his ability to imagine new patterns, and then to test them as to whether or not those "shadows of imagination" represented anything in the perceived patterns of consensual reality. If this was the case, then one might accuse Einstein of advocating fantasy for utilitarian purposes, as Peter Washington said of Calvino in this quote:
By presenting possible worlds, [the writer] can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.
But of course Einstein didn't make any definitive statement as to the utility of fantasy. All he says is that fairy tales are good for intelligence, and that the gift for fantasy has meant more to him than his lauded capacity for "abstract, positive thinking," which I compare to Cassirer's concept of "discursive thinking."
Purely for motives of self-flattery, I'd like to think that he had some intuition along the lines of my own: that the capacity for fantasy, for representing what may not be real, goes hand in hand with the capacity for testing reality, for representing what seems to be real.
But as I said-- no one really knows.