quotations about imagination
Everything you can imagine is real.
ANONYMOUS
All our other faculties seem to have the brown touch of earth upon them, but the imagination carries the very livery of heaven, and is God's self in the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Imagination has great power. If you make a picture in the mind, the vibrations of the body may adjust to it if the will is directed that way, as in thoughts of health or sickness.
ELSA BARKER
Letters from a Living Dead Man
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
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Character of Physical Law
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
Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
ANAIS NIN
Henry and June
My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Selected Tales
Imagination can be developed. Those who have little may develop much. Those who have much may develop more.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
People speak of imagination with praise, as an attainment or attribute of great men whose ability and power have shaped destinies of nations and the world; and the same people will speak of it as being the characteristic of others who are not practical, who have vagrant fancies and weak minds; that the visions of such are of no use, their dreams never materialize, they expect what never happens; and, they are looked on with pity or contempt.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
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
This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Let your mind be hospitable to lofty ideals and noble aspirations. See only the good and beautiful and there will be no power in the universe that can keep these things from manifesting themselves in your life and experience. Never let your imagination dwell in undesirable things that you do not want to come into your experience.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Imagination", Human Life from Many Angles
Imagination will continue to sway destinies. It will carry some up into the heights and others into the depths. It may make or unmake men.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets.
JULIEN OFFRAY DE LA METTRIE
Man a Machine
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
RICHARD RORTY
introduction, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers
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