quotations about imagination
Imagination is an inner resource. That's why it takes stopping, slowing, silencing, reassuring, embracing to allow it to speak.
SUZANNE BETH STINNETT
Little Shifts
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
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
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
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
Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
ANAIS NIN
Henry and June
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
This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.
JOHN L. MASON
You're Born an Original
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
RICHARD RORTY
introduction, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
On Science
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
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
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed -- or cursed -- with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.
CHRIS ABANI
Technology, Oct. 2007