Keep your imagination under control. You must sometimes correct it, sometimes assist it. For it is all important for our happiness and balances reason. The imagination can tyrannize, not being content with looking on, but influences and even often dominates our life. It can make us happy or burden us, depending on the folly that it leads us to. It can make us either content or discontent with ourselves. Before some people it continually holds up the penalties of action and becomes the mortifying lash of fools. To others the imagination promises happiness and adventure with blissful delusion. It can do all this unless you lord over it with the most prudent self-control.
THE ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM BY BALTHASAR GRACIAN
TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH JACOBS 1892