quotations about imagination
Imagination flourishes just beyond the real, the known, the concrete.
ROBERT A. KOWAL
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"Weird Cinema: Through the Lens Darkly," Weird Tales, Summer 2011
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
New Notes on E. Poe
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 pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook C", Aphorisms
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
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
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Thought paceth like a hoary sage, but imagination hath wings as an eagle.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Everything you can imagine is real.
ANONYMOUS
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 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
Small towns harbor small imaginations.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
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 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
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
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
Imagination is life itself, fully creating reality through an interpretive perception of it.
RONALD SCHENK
The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
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