IMAGINATION QUOTES II
quotations about imagination
Do not confuse fantasy with imagination: the former consumes itself in daydreaming, the latter stimulates creativity in the arts and in the sciences.
FAUSTO CERCIGNANI
attributed, Simply Transcribed: Quotations from Fausto Cercignani
Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.
LAUREN BACALL
Lauren Bacall By Myself
The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
Pure imagination, of which the loveliest of winged creatures is the fitting emblem, seems always to gain a vigor and grace by the tempests it encounters, and in contrary winds to show the brightest plumage.
ROBERT ARIS WILLMOTT
Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature
Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Choke
Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.
J. M. COETZEE
Slow Man
Imagination is that faculty by which, from materials already existing in the mind, we form complicated conceptions or mental images, according to our own will.
FRANCIS WAYLAND
The Elements of Intellectual Philosophy
Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française", Salon de 1859
Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The most important thing for a child to learn is that only some things can be imagined into reality. The most important thing for an adult to learn is that even if it doesn’t happen all the time, things DO get imagined into reality.
JOHN GREEN
Chicago Public Library interview
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
All governments,
Books, customs, buildings, railways, ships, and all
The stark realities that men have made,
Are but imagination's utterances.
HENRY ABBEY
"Eleusinia"
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
The life of the imagination is a vital element of our total nature. If we starve it or pollute it the quality of our life is depressed or soiled.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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
Back to Methuselah
The human imagination is an ample theatre upon which everything in human life, good or bad, great or small, laudable or base, is acted.
THOMAS REID
"On the Intellectual Powers", The Works of Thomas Reid
There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Sprüche in Prosa
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Harper's magazine, Aug. 1990
When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.
L. M. MONTGOMERY
Anne of Green Gables
The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye--not creation, but insight.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk