Quotes About Imagination

Imagination helps you to recognize the reality of facts, but then to go beyond them, to penetrate beneath them, to rise above them in your search for creative answers to problems. Imagination "stirs up the gift of God in thee." Through your imagination you touch and express the inspiration of the Infinite. Imagination, in the words of Shakespeare, "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." You reach into the heavens to grasp an idea, then you bring it down to earth and make it work.

The power of imagination is the ultimate creative power.. no doubt about that. While knowledge defines all we currently know and understand.. imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions

When we find ourselves unable to reason (as one often does when presented with, say, a problem in algebra) it is because our imagination is not touched. One can begin to reason only when a clear picture has been formed in the imagination. Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination.

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?

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

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.

If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.

The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.

You can keep your mind open and use your imagination and be creative even when you're older. For kids, I definitely think keeping your mind open and using your imagination and being able to play pretend and that it's okay.

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently ... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is ... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!

The creative process ignites our imagination, and I believe that that same imagination is what will propel us forward with issues of social change. I do think we have to acknowledge that we are a very capitalistic and consumptive nation, and that talk about conservation or issues of sustainability is never going to be popular with the dominant culture because it means checks and balances on an economy that is reserved for the dollar, rather than an economy that honors and respects spiritual resources and the right of all life to participate on the planet, not just our species.

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.

You can say the president's private life takes up so much of his time that he doesn't focus on his job, so therefore he's terrible. But in my imagination, the 23 hours of the day that we don't experience, he's very hard at work. He's quite an effective and successful president - in my narcissistic imagination.

Without design thinking, the only sane response to a problem is to make a smaller, "safer" move. Smaller moves don't get you very far. They key is to let out the leash on imagination, but not take it off the leash. Imagination is the only path to innovation. It's a good example of something that humans do better than machines.

Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because of the inherent constraints that our bodies offer, or you can call them 'affordances' - that's another word for me. It's a little more positive; doesn't make it seem like a limitation, but rather, a set of opportunities. You can say that that's part of music making, but there's also the imagination. The power of the imagination is kind of trumping - sorry to have to use that word.

I try to be as faithful as possible to the facts as I understand them, but any story is at least partly a product of the imagination. I can comprehend a lot by immersing myself in all of the information I've collected, but my imagination is what brings it to life, and the bridging of that gap - between the received history and the conceived fiction - is both the most difficult and most enjoyable part of the process for me.

Imagination is essential and it comes first, for without imagination we are aimless.

Your imagination has much to do with your life.... It is for you to decide how you want your imagination to serve you.

The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

Every parent knows this moment in a child's age when he or she needs your attention in a very specific way because it's the beginning and ending of the early life of imagination. It's such a responsibility.

The children know all about everything so well that it never occurs to them to play at the situations in any one of these tales, or even to read it twice over. But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible —even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it the beauty forsakesall the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Love requires imagination more than experience.

As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.

Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist--for we would be no longer who we are.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .

I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible.

Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. Its just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.

You're already using your imagination because you're watching fiction and then you're trying to believe that this girl who weighs 100 lbs, soaking wet, could actually beat up a guy. Which works in a lot of situations but in a lot of situations you look at it and you're like, "Come on. Could you please get someone in there who actually has biceps and not just because they don't eat?"

I guess I'm a very keen observer, and I'd like to think I have a good imagination.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.