Imagination Quotes Quotes

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."

"Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?"

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night."

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

"Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"

"The man who has no imagination has no wings."

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact."

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

"The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury."

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

"Imagination rules the world."

"Live out of your imagination, not your history."

"Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed."

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."

"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."

"Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public."

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel."

"There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination."

"I imagine that yes is the only living thing."

"Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' And then do it."

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."

"To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all."

"One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines."

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea."

"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."

"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."

"I always imagined I could be what I wanted to be."

"Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love."

"I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack."

"You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible."

"Some stories are true that never happened."

"I believed in myself. I never imagined myself as just an ordinary player."

"It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object beware of this stumbling block."

"Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica."

"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."

"I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally."

"We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains."

"The imagination is man's power over nature."

"Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity."

"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos."

"The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible."

"There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine."

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

"The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory."

"Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning."

"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

"All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth."

"Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination."

"First comes thought then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination."

"It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart it being much more sensitive."

"Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling."

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

"Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination."

"We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."

"Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction."

"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."

"The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed."

"We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness."

"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."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"Few people have the imagination for reality."

"The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment."

"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."

"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."

"Imagination is the true magic carpet."

"Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense."

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."

"Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste."

"My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people."

"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination."

"Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely."

"The power of imagination makes us infinite."

"Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves."

"The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope."

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination do not become the slave of your model."

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination."

"The human race is governed by its imagination."

"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."

"A lady's imagination is very rapid it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."

"Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable."

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."

"The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."

"Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."

"Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions."

"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."

"My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias."

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities."

"A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate."

"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."

"Imagination is the eye of the soul."

"Imagination decides everything."

"Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted."

"Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have."

"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous."

"Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination."

"Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell."

"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos."

"My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

"However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension."

"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice."

"I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn't that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that's when your creativity is developed, when you're young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to."

"Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess."

"An idea is salvation by imagination."

"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another."

"Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination."

"The world of reality has its limits the world of imagination is boundless."

"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of 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?"

"Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute."

"The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him."

"Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it."

"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."

"A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory."

"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."

"My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."

"The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability."

"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."

"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

"A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions."

"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it."

"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."

"Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are."

"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination."

"He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart."

"One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet."

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

"Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."

"Where there is no imagination there is no horror."

"The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible."

"Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination."

"Free enterprise empowers entrepreneurs who have ideas and imagination, investors who take risks, and workers who hone their skills and offer their labor."

"I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea."

"Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else."

"Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination."

"It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?"

"When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception."

"The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted."

"It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory."

"Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination."

"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."

"The conscious process is reflected in the imagination the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling."

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

"Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries."

"I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated."

"When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you."

"The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination."

"But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it."

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it."

"To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination."

"Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism."

"Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction."

"I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman."

"I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?"

"There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny."

"Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that."

"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."

"I've done a lot of bad things. Use your imagination."

"Man lives by imagination."

"Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain."

"The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing."

"I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character."

"Imagination creates reality."

"In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature."

"It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing."

"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need."

"A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works."

"You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination."

"Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much."

"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."

"I have a very vivid imagination."

"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."

"Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never."

"This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts."

"If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies."

"It takes no imagination to live within your means."

"A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache."

"I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting."

"My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead."

"What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula."

"I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me."

"One longs for a director with a sense of imagination."

"We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark."

"I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be."

"I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world."

"Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination."

"The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer."

"Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly."

"An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house."

"You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination."

"Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work."

"If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted."

"People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up."

"Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself."

"Well, I'm not a method actress by any stretch of the imagination so the best thing that I can do is be as real as possible and find whatever commonality in that character that I can see myself."

"Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster."

"Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own."

"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination."

"Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships."

"Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall."

"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master."

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."

"Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days."

"To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily."

"One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination."

"In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman."

"Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing."

"I had a good imagination and I still have one a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away."

"I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can."

"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."

"I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one."

"Imagination has a great deal to do with winning."

"Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination."

"The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination."

"I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be."

"I don't want to go on much longer, really. I think that would suggest a lack of imagination. A certain lack of dignity also."

"You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."

"Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave."

"It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women."

"My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me."

"I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching."

"Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind."

"My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify."

"Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth."

"The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from."

"If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people."

"The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence."