quotations about imagination
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Choke
Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Small towns harbor small imaginations.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
MARCEL PROUST
The Captive & The Fugitive
Imagination has great power. If you make a picture in the mind, the vibrations of the body may adjust to it if the will is directed that way, as in thoughts of health or sickness.
ELSA BARKER
Letters from a Living Dead Man
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.
JOHN L. MASON
You're Born an Original
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Character of Physical Law
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
ANAIS NIN
Henry and June
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed -- or cursed -- with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Selected Tales
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
On Science
This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
RICHARD RORTY
introduction, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
People speak of imagination with praise, as an attainment or attribute of great men whose ability and power have shaped destinies of nations and the world; and the same people will speak of it as being the characteristic of others who are not practical, who have vagrant fancies and weak minds; that the visions of such are of no use, their dreams never materialize, they expect what never happens; and, they are looked on with pity or contempt.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word