quotations about imagination
Imagination is the air of mind.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Your imagination is irrepressible. You will always imagine something. The question is: Will you imagine something that empowers you to accomplish your dreams and goals, or will you use your imagination to bring the thing you fear into existence?
LANCE MORTON
Mentally Create Your Ideal Weight
Imagination is not an intangible nebula of dreams, fancies, hallucinations, fantasms, illusions, empty nothings. Imagination does things. Things are done in imagination. What is done in imagination is as real to the one who does it as are the products of imagination when harnessed to physical uses.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
The unimaginative man lives by rule according to habit, in set forms and grooves, and based on experience. He does not wish to change them, but wants to continue these. Perhaps he thinks they should be improved, but any improvement should be along the lines of what has been. He dreads the unknown. The unknown has no attraction for him. The imaginator lives by change, according to impressions, in moods and emotions, based on his hopes and ideals. He does not dread the unknown; or, if he does, it has for him the attraction of adventure.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
WALLACE STEVENS
The Necessary Angel
Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
SAUL BELLOW
Henderson the Rain King
What is thinkable is also possible.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
ROBERT FULGHUM
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Imagination is life itself, fully creating reality through an interpretive perception of it.
RONALD SCHENK
The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
KARL MARX
Capital
The imagination is the spur of delights ... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADE
Philosophy in the Bedroom
Our imagination is the most important faculty we possess. It can be our greatest resource or our most formidable adversary. It is through our imagination that we discern possibilities and options. Yet imagination is no mere blank slate on which we simply inscribe our will. Rather, imagination is the deepest voice of the soul and can be heard clearly only through cultivation and careful attention. A relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self.
PAT B. ALLEN
Art Is a Way of Knowing
The only faculty by which we can bring the invisible near, is the imagination. Beyond that which the eye sees, beyond that which the ear hears, is a great region in which life is freer and more transcendently glorious than this. The imagination in us finds its field in trying to grasp that great fact.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
That which men suppose the imagination to be, and to do, is often frivolous enough and mischievous enough; but that which God meant it to be in the mental economy is not merely noble, but supereminent. It is the distinguishing element in all refinement. It is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith. The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
PAUL GOODMAN
Growing Up Absurd
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Choke
Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad