Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

imagination

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination.

Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.

A lady's imagination is very rapid it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.

Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.

People can die of mere imagination.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.

To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

Man lives by imagination.

One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination do not become the slave of your model.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

Imagination creates reality.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Imagination is the true magic carpet.

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

True change takes place in the imagination.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Imagination decides everything.

Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object beware of this stumbling block.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind it is a way of engaging reality.

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart it being much more sensitive.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

Imagination rules the world.

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

We especially need imagination in science.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven it is my inheritance, I suppose.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

But who can paint like Nature? Can imagination boast, amid its gay creation, hues like hers?

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.