The Governance of the Imagination

"It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it."

- Charles Baudelaire, Lettres à M. le Directeur de 'La revue française,' III: 'La reine des facultés' (1859)