Quotes About Imagination

What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.

I think the secret of great acting is that you have to bring your imagination to the party. You have to have a great imagination and you have to bring it every day when you're working. Your imagination and your skills as an actor are what see you through, not what you're wearing or where you are.

Imagination 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.

Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.

It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.

Without imagination, you live in a small room with the windows closed. Imagination opens the windows and shows us landscapes, horizons that we would not otherwise perceive…I want education to empower people to see possibility.

Only people who have been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Elliot calls 'hollow men'. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to.

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.

Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet.

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

By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moralexistence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.

I love connecting with kids. I love connecting with children of all ages to keep their imagination active because that's the key to happiness and imagination and creativity.

Imagination without knowledge may create beautiful things, knowledge without imagination can create only perfect ones.

Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead . . . for in imagination, we can create wonders.

The law of attraction says there are no limits and anything is possible. Your imagination has no limits, and anything is possible for you to imagine! Isn't it interesting that the law of attraction and your imagination say the same thing? Think about it. What's it telling you?

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty . . .

Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination.

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers."-Clive Barker

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ 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.

But see that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Your Imagination is YOU yourself, and the world as your Imagination sees it is the real world.

I think that is the secret of great acting. You have to bring your imagination to the party. You've got to have a great imagination.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, & the imagination’s hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge. Pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

You've got to believe in yourself, or no one will believe in you. Imagination is like a bird on the wing, flying free for you to use.

The only moment ever available to you is the present moment. Everything else is memory or imagination.

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.

While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

Imagination is so much more fertile than life.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

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.

Challenging the status quo takes commitment, courage, imagination, and, above all, dedication to learning.

I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information

Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.