Popular quotes about Imagination! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 32
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.
Northrop FryeImagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
D. A. CarsonNo one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.
James A. BaldwinHaven't you noticed that we women daydream infinitely less than you men? We can't anticipate pleasure in our imagination or keep suffering out our lives with some imaginary consolation.Whatever is,is.Imagintion! It's so paltry!Yes,when you've grown older,as I have,you occasionally make do with the poor comedy of the imagination.
Jens Peter JacobsenHalf the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.
Alice Morse EarleTo 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.
Barry LopezI do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Richard DawkinsImagination, 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 โ a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa CatherMy husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!
Judy BlumeFiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
Jean BaudrillardAnxiety uses imagination to picture something you don't want. Vision uses imagination to picture something you DO want. Either way, you tend to get what you focus on. Imagine a future where you shine, others thrive, and the light of hope shines brighter in the world. If you can see it, you can be it.
Ian LawtonWishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.
Gregory MaguireThe true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet. The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities.
SethYour imagination can focus on ugliness, distress and failure, or it can picture beauty, success, desired results. You decide how you want your imagination to server you.
Philip Mallory ConleyCivility is a work of the imagination, for it is through the imagination that we render others sufficiently like ourselves for them to become subjects of tolerance and respect, if not always affection.
Benjamin BarberThe characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level โ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.
Jim ButcherThe opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Charles KetteringJust as one's imagination is stirred by a girl's smile, so is one's imagination stirred by the possibilities of chess.
Mikhail Talthe English don't go in for imagination: imagination is considered to be improper if not downright alarmist.
Martha GellhornI have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.
Dave AttellWe are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.
Gloria E. AnzaldรบaCreativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it.
Ken RobinsonCertainly I've lived my whole life through my imagination. But the world of imagination is there for all of us--a sense of play, of pretending, of wonder. It's there with us as we live.
Jim Henson"Le gรฉnie n'est qu'une longue patience", a dit Buffon. Cela est bien incomplet. Le gรฉnie, c'est l'impatience dans les idรฉes et la patience dans les faits : une imagination vive et un jugement calme; quelque chose comme un liquide en รฉbullition dans un vase qui reste toujours froid. "Genius is just enduring patience," said Buffon. This is far from complete. Genius is impatience in ideas and patience with the facts: a lively imagination and a calm judgment, rather like a liquid boiling in a cup that remains cold.
Leo ErreraAll meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert EinsteinImagination Is More Powerful Than Knowledge Because Knowledhe Is Limited But Imagination Is Without Boundaries
Albert EinsteinI write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.
John UpdikeImagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.
Thomas MertonMy work is always based on reality. I'm not an artist that creates works of fiction. I'm not an artist who is in my studio inventing things out of my imagination - everything is based on reality, on real facts.
Alfredo JaarThe 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 โeven where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.
Charlotte MasonThe heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Marcel ProustIf leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led.
George TakeiI often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Terence McKennaWhile childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.
Charles LambNature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKennataking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandonded her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropial flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fantasy.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.
Robert WylandI think writers have to be able to enjoy solitude rather than just endure it. I've always enjoyed being left alone with my imagination, ever since I was a kid.
Peter RobinsonSo scary watching the news...Like Iraq...could ever under any stretch of the imagination be any threat to us whatsoever.
Bill HicksTo enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
Simon CallowROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination . . .
Ambrose BierceIt is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, โprogressโ would become mechanical and trivial.
Bertrand RussellWhile I canโt have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. Iโd take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. Iโd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say โWill youโฆโ my answer is โYesโ, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
Jeanette Winterson