Imagination
See also Creativity
- All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.--Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
- Any successful journey begins by packing your luggage full of imagination.--Kathrine Palmer Peterson
- Consistency: the last refuge of the unimaginative.--Michael Rawls
- The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.--Daniel Boorstin
- The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.--Carl Jung
- Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.--Albert Szent-Gyorgi (in The Scientist Speculates ed. by Good)
- Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.--Mae Jemison
- Dragons will wander about
the waste places,
and the phoenix will soar
from her nest of fire
into the air.
We shall lay our hands
upon the Basilisk,
and see the jewel
in the toad's head.
Champing his gilded oats,
the hippogriff will stand
in our stalls,
and over our heads
will float the bluebird,
singing of beautiful and
impossible things,
of things that are lovely
and that never happened,
of things that are not
and that should be.--Oscar Wilde (The Decay of Lying)
- Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.--John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty)
- Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.--Barbara G. Harrison
- The Gleam of an heroic act,
Such strange illumination--
The Possible's slow fuse it lit
By the Imagination.--Emily Dickinson (Poem #1867)
- The great successful men of the world have used their imagination...they think ahead and create their mental picture in all it details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building-steadily building.--Robert Collier
- The greatest discoveries have come from people who have looked at a standard situation and seen it differrently.--Ira Erwin
- He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.--Joseph Joubert (Pensées)
- Here's to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.--Short version of the Apple Computer Ad
- I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.--Albert Einstein
- I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge
That myth is more potent than history
I believe 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
- I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant.--Ursula K. LeGuin ("Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" Language of the Night)
- I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.--Maureen Howard
- I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters, they are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude through our own apathy.--J. K. Rowling (Harvard Commencement Address)
- If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.--William Arthur Ward
- If you don't daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination, you never get there. So you have to start someplace.--Robert Duvall
- Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!"--Bill Bradley (Values of the Game)
- The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.--Mary Caroline Richards
- Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to popular belief, is more powerful in the mature than the young.--W. Somerset Maugham
- Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams--daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.--L. Frank Baum
- Imagination is as good as many voyages--and how much cheaper.--George W. Curtis
- Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.--Albert Einstein
- Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.--Irving Howe ("Characters: Are They Like People?" A Critics Notebook)
- Imagination is our ability to see inwardly and picture there that which has not yet appeared outwardly. Imagination is God's gift to us.--Donald Curtis
- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.--George Bernard Shaw
- Imagination is the eye of the soul.--Joseph Joubert
- Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles. The mental pattern must always precede the material form.--William W. Atkinson
- Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.--Lauren Bacall
- Imagination is the spark that ignites the fire of creativity.--Richard Laurence Peterson
- Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.--Jules de Gaultier
- Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.--Carl Sagan
- In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.--Shunryu Suzuki
- It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination...If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.--Annie Dillard
- It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.--Ursula LeGuin
- It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.--Vincent van Gogh
- It's counter to common sense, but common sense is only based on a very small subset of the universe.--Ian J Davenport (Univ. of Reading, UK)
- It's time to start living the life you've imagined.--Henry James
- The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination...you can make feast of straw.--Jane Stanton Hitchcock
- Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.--Robert H. Schuller
- Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving out quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.--Sidney Sheldon
- Life is too short to be little. You must enlarge your imagination and then act on it.--Benjamin Disraeli
- Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.--Jamie Paolinetti
- Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.--Les Brown
- Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.--Albert Einstein
- One of the virtues of the very young is that you don't let facts get in the way of your imagination.--Sam Levinson
- Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.--Margaret Atwood
- Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.--Dr. Ralph Gerard
- The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money ... they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.--Alan Watts
- So you see, imagination needs coddling--long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.--Brenda Ueland
- Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can't. We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have imagine. -- David Almond
- Storytelling is how we survive, when there's no feed, the story feeds something, it feeds the spirit, the imagination. I can't imagine life without stories, stories from my parents, my culture. Stories from other people's parents, their culture. That's how we learn from each other, it's the best way. That's why literature is so important, it connects us heart to heart.--Alice Walker
- This alone is to be feared - the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.--Winifred Holtby
- The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.--William Blake
- The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.--Albert Einstein
- We all use our imagination every day. However, most of us are unaware that what we envision affects every cell of our bodies and every aspect of our performance.--Marilyn King
- We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.--Donald Curtis
- We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.--Neil Gaiman
- What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?--Rollo May (The Courage to Create)
- When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.--Albert Einstein
- When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.--Emile Coue
- When we read a book, our most essential trait - imagination - is given the opportunity to soar.--St. Augustine
- When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes.--Neil Gaiman
- Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.--Joan Aiken
- The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else's life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives that somehow we hadn't been able to see before.--Katherine Patterson
- The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.--Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Worry is a misuse of the imagination.--Dan Zadra
- You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.--Mark Twain
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