Quotes and Sayings about Imagination
"Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute."
- Franklin P. Adams
(Related: Imagination)
"My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."
- John Adams
(Related: Imagination, Country, Invention, Man, Office)
"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."
- John Adams
(Related: Imagination, Charm, Eye, Wonder)
"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."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Imagination, Soul, Idea, Curiosity, Pleasure)
"One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap."
- Stella Adler
(Related: Imagination, Scientists)
"The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted."
- Aesop
(Related: Imagination, Success, Act, Kindness)
"I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings."
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich
(Related: Imagination, Desire, Detail, Mind)
"The man who has no imagination has no wings."
- Muhammad Ali
(Related: Imagination, Man)
"One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations."
- Steve Allen
(Related: Problems)
"The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older."
- Chris Van Allsburg
(Related: Imagination, Power, Faith, Children, Desire, Magic, World)
"It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Imagination, Ideas, Waiting)
"It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today."
- Michael Apted
(Related: Imagination, Talent, Skill, Today)
"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."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Imagination, Men, Work, Fear, Ideas, Control, Error, Reason, Senses)
"I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show."
- Matthew Ashford
(Related: Imagination, Ability)
"To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination."
- Frank Auerbach
(Related: Imagination, Work, People, Beginning, Magic, Sense, Will)
"Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely."
- Marcus Aurelius
(Related: Imagination, Genius, Reason, Understanding)
"What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!"
- Jane Austen
(Related: Self)
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
- Jane Austen
(Related: Imagination, Love, Admiration, Lady, Matrimony)
"Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."
- Lauren Bacall
(Related: Imagination)
"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."
- Gaston Bachelard
(Related: Imagination, Books, Literary, Writer)
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Humor, Imagination, Man, Sense)
"It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations."
- Walter Bagehot
(Related: Men, Weakness)
"It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary."
- David Bailey
(Related: Imagination, Photography)
"Imagination is the air of mind."
- Philip James Bailey
(Related: Imagination, Mind)
"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."
- Christian Bale
(Related: Imagination)
"I love the paranormal, because there, every genre I write can become one beacon for my imagination."
- Leslie Banks
(Related: Imagination, Love)
"My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that."
- Clive Barker
(Related: Imagination)
"To put up a show is to face life's injustices with one of the few weapons available to a desperate and brave people, their imagination."
- Luigi Barzini
(Related: Imagination, People, Life, Weapons)
"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."
- L. Frank Baum
(Related: Imagination, Civilization, America, Columbus, Electricity, Mankind, Present, State)
"Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers."
- Les Baxter
(Related: Imagination, Challenge, Musicians, Popular, Song)
"Faith is spiritualized imagination."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Faith, Imagination)
"The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Imagination, Soul)
"Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination."
- Daniel Bell
(Related: Imagination, Art, Technology, Exercise)
"I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Imagination, Money, Idea, Books)
"The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open."
- John Berger
(Related: Dreams, Imagination, Difficulty, Living, Open, Philosophy, Practice)
"You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Life, Imagination, Perception, Vision, Will)
"That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow."
- George Berkeley
(Related: Imagination, Ideas, Thoughts, Body, Mind, Will)
"The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them."
- John Desmond Bernal
(Related: Imagination, Body, Company, Mind)
"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."
- Claude Bernard
(Related: Imagination)
"Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Imagination, Possessions)
"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory."
- Josh Billings
(Related: Imagination, Mistake, People, Memory)
"His imagination conceived and bore - worlds; but nothing in these worlds became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was the breath of life; and, sooner or later, he invariably found it."
- Algernon H. Blackwood
(Related: Imagination, Life, Living, Name, Nothing)
"When you are young your imagination is so clear."
- Nina Blackwood
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- William Blake
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Eyes, Joy, Man, Ridicule, Tears)
"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."
- William Blake
(Related: Imagination, Shadow, Universe, World)
"Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure."
- Felix Bloch
(Related: Imagination, Treasure, Youth)
"How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination."
- Nellie Bly
(Related: Imagination, Pleas, Sanity, Will, Woman)
"The human race is governed by its imagination."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
(Related: Imagination, Race)
"Imagination rules the world."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
(Related: Imagination, Rules, World)
"People know that they're going to see something which is entertaining but challenging as well because of the form it's in. It's dance theatre and it requires you to use your imagination - it's not straight forward."
- Matthew Bourne
(Related: Imagination, People, Dance, Theatre)
"Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination."
- Christian Nestell Bovee
(Related: Imagination, Enemy)
"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."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Imagination, Life, Force, Universe, Will)
"Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!""
- Bill Bradley
(Related: Imagination, Wisdom, Saying)
"Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination."
- Tycho Brahe
(Related: Imagination, Now)
"By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment."
- Dorthea Brande
(Related: Imagination, Acting, Day)
"Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior."
- Georg Brandes
(Related: Imagination, Life, Time, Brother, Strength, School, Years)
"Because of my faith and my imagination, I was able to enjoy my childhood, even though it was tough."
- Donna Brazile
(Related: Faith, Imagination, Childhood)
"We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do."
- Jacob Bronowski
(Related: Nature, Imagination, Civilization, Confidence, Future, Man, World)
"Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Imagination, Country, Importance)
"I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Imagination, Want)
"When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Entertainment)
"We forget that what matters begins with the imagination."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Imagination, Forget)
"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."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Imagination, Entertainment, Growing up)
"I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action."
- James Broughton
(Related: Imagination, Action, Students)
"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully."
- William C. Bryant
(Related: Art, Imagination, Poetry, Thought)
"Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether."
- Luis Bunuel
(Related: Imagination, People, Chance, Fact, Freedom, Lies, Mystery, Trying)
"There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination."
- Edmund Burke
(Related: Imagination, Men, Feelings, Act, Influence)
"Imagination is but another name for super intelligence."
- Edgar Rice Burroghs
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Name)
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another."
- John Burroughs
(Related: Imagination, Facts)
"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."
- Maria Callas
(Related: Life, Imagination, Opera)
"Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination."
- John Cameron
(Related: Imagination, Memory, Prizes, Research)
"Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Imagination, Company, Poor, Understanding)
"Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too."
- Joyce Cary
(Related: Imagination, Love, Apples, Trees)
"My best investment is my imagination, because it has never failed to bring me my greatest returns!"
- Randy Castillo
(Related: Imagination, Investment)
"We have to instill in them the skills they need to succeed at a young age and open up their imaginations to the very real opportunities they can be afforded if they put their minds to it."
- Michael N. Castle
(Related: Age, Open, Succeed)
"Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made."
- Bruce Catton
(Related: Imagination, Certainty, Road)
"People can die of mere imagination."
- Geoffrey Chaucer
(Related: Imagination, People)
"To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination."
- Lord Chesterfield
(Related: Imagination, Want)
"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."
- Noam Chomsky
(Related: Imagination, Censorship)
"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."
- Deepak Chopra
(Related: Imagination, Time, Living, World)
"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Imagination, Life, Memory)
"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."
- John Henrik Clarke
(Related: Imagination, God, People, Spiritual)
"There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time."
- Jill Clayburgh
(Related: Time, Imagination, Life, Environment, First)
"I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Imagination, Work, Beginning)
"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination."
- Alexander Cockburn
(Related: Imagination, Travel, World, Writer)
"Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Imagination, Talent, Genius, Action, Being, Lying, Reason, Understanding)
"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Imagination, Language)
"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."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Trust, Act, Borrowing, Memory)
"The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination."
- Robert Collier
(Related: Imagination, Power, Man)
"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."
- Robert Collier
(Related: Imagination, Vision)
"I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be."
- Billy Connolly
(Related: Imagination)
"Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Imagination, Science, Artist, Myth, Today)
"Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
- Joseph Conrad
(Related: Art, Imagination, Life, Truth, Men, Existence, Invention)
"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Society, People, Facts)
"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."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Imagination, Impression, Character, Man, Unity, Words)
"Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Imagination, Future, Past, Taste)
"Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Imagination, Desire, Fantasy)
"Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Imagination, Rules)
"I've got research, I have my own life experience I can apply, and I have my imagination."
- Chris Cooper
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Life, Research)
"Death is the tyrant of the imagination."
- Barry Cornwall
(Related: Death, Imagination)
"When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception."
- Emile Coue
(Related: Imagination, Power, Conflict, Will)
"Live out of your imagination, not your history."
- Stephen Covey
(Related: History, Imagination)
"Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change."
- Stephen Covey
(Related: Change, Power, Imagination, Awareness, Conscience, Freedom, Self, Self awareness, Will)
"The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Imagination, Corporations, Poverty)
"Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is."
- Yvonne Craig
(Related: Imagination)
"Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!"
- Robert Creeley
(Related: Imagination, People, May, Reading, Writing)
"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."
- e. e. cummings
(Related: Imagination, Knowledge, Word)
"Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!"
- George William Curtis
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Claire Danes
(Related: Imagination, Being)
"When you believe in what you're doing and use your imagination and initiative, you can make a difference."
- Samuel Dash
(Related: Imagination, Difference)
"Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit."
- Doris Day
(Related: Imagination, Vulgarity)
"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."
- James Dean
(Related: Imagination, Actor, Being, World)
"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."
- Edgar Degas
(Related: Imagination, Memory, Now)
"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
- John Dewey
(Related: Imagination, Science)
"Some people have active imaginations, but they don't know me and they're wrong if they think they do."
- Yamila Diaz
(Related: People, Wrong)
"I have a very vivid imagination."
- Janice Dickinson
(Related: Imagination)
"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark."
- Annie Dillard
(Related: Imagination, Memory)
"Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I've learned in my own life."
- Ronnie James Dio
(Related: Life, Imagination)
"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."
- Walt Disney
(Related: Imagination, Will, World)
"Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will."
- Robert Doisneau
(Related: Imagination, People, Now, Will)
"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Power, Knowledge, Facts, Learning, Literature, Sound)
"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."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Imagination, Success)
"Where there is no imagination there is no horror."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Imagination, Horror)
"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Imagination, Life, Effort)
"The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion."
- Elizabeth Drew
(Related: Imagination, Thought, Opinion, World)
"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
- Jean Dubuffet
(Related: Imagination, Creativity, Insanity)
"I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination."
- Patty Duke
(Related: Imagination, Life)
"Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."
- Emile Durkheim
(Related: Dreams, Reality)
"For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Art, Imagination, People, Life, Artists, Compromise, Destiny, Potential)
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
- Thomas A. Edison
(Related: Imagination)
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Logic, Will)
"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Life)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Knowledge)
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Artist)
"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Science, Old, Possibilities, Problems, Questions)
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Knowledge)
"My imagination completely controls me, and forever feeds the fire that burns with dark red light in my heart by bringing me the best dreams. I've always had a wild imagination, a big heart and a tortured soul so I feel that dark fantasy, love and horror are in my blood."
- Kim Elizabeth
(Related: Imagination, Love, Dreams, Soul, Heart, Blood, Fantasy, Fire, Horror, Light)
"Man lives by imagination."
- Henry Ellis
(Related: Imagination, Man)
"Science does not know its debt to imagination."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Imagination, Science, Debt)
"It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care."
- Paul Farmer
(Related: Medical, Imagination, Care, Poor)
"Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking."
- James L. Farmer, Jr.
(Related: Imagination, Time, Civil rights)
"The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination."
- Sarah Fielding
(Related: Imagination, Wife, Being, Liberty, Loss)
"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Imagination, Work, Language, Nothing, Question)
"She has no imagination and that means no compassion."
- Michael Foot
(Related: Imagination, Compassion)
"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."
- Henry Ford
(Related: Imagination, Man, Skill, Succeed, Will)
"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."
- Janet Frame
(Related: Imagination, Writing, Years)
"Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly."
- Christopher Fry
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Eye)
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
- Robert Fulghum
(Related: Death, Dreams, Imagination, Love, Experience, History, Knowledge, Hope, Cure, Facts, Grief, Laughter, Myth)
"I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination."
- Cornelia Funke
(Related: Imagination)
"We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination."
- Richard Le Gallienne
(Related: Imagination, Beauty, Truth, Mystery, Senses)
"We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality."
- Judy Garland
(Related: Death, Time, Dreams, Imagination, Illusion, Reality)
"You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance."
- David Garrick
(Related: Imagination, Importance)
"You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination."
- Charles de Gaulle
(Related: Imagination, Americans, May, Will)
"It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination."
- Martha Gellhorn
(Related: Imagination)
"The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt."
- Henry George
(Related: Imagination, Invention, Mankind, March)
"With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour."
- Theodore Gericault
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Jerry Gillies
(Related: Imagination, Energy, Will)
"Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil."
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Related: Death, Imagination, Life, Evil, World)
"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
- Jean Giraudoux
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Truth, Law, Study)
"We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
- Jean Giraudoux
(Related: Nature, Imagination, Truth, Law, Schools)
"I like photographs which leave something to the imagination."
- Fay Godwin
(Related: Imagination)
"There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness."
- William Godwin
(Related: Imagination, Exercise)
"There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination."
- William Godwin
(Related: Imagination, Love, Passion)
"Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Imagination, Nothing, Taste)
"Few people have the imagination for reality."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Imagination, People, Reality)
"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Imagination, Knowledge, Fantasy, Taste)
"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Imagination, Inspiration)
"I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be."
- Whoopi Goldberg
(Related: Imagination)
"I think my imagination dictates the technologies I use. But at the same time, my imagination can be technologic. Sometimes I see a tool and I know immediately how to use it, but most of the time I use the tool for an idea I already have."
- Michel Gondry
(Related: Imagination, Time, Idea)
"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."
- Nadine Gordimer
(Related: Imagination, Censorship)
"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."
- Al Gore
(Related: Imagination, People, Creativity, American, Democracy, Software)
"Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination."
- Al Gore
(Related: Imagination, Challenge, Faces, World)
"A child who has never fantasized about having other parents is seriously lacking in imagination."
- Fred G. Gosman
(Related: Imagination, Parents)
"A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache."
- Catherine the Great
(Related: Imagination, Wind)
"If you don't pay attention and if your imagination isn't pretty much engaged, you're going to miss things and you're going to miss opportunities for it to be as compelling and as creepy as it can be."
- Bruce Greenwood
(Related: Imagination, Attention, Pretty)
"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
(Related: Imagination, Fool, World)
"It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
(Related: Imagination, Hope, Perception, Compassion)
"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
(Related: Imagination, Doubt)
"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Society, Imagination, Heart, Painting, Sculpture)
"Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Imagination, Care, Infinite)
"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."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Imagination, Identity)
"We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Movies, Imagination, Drama, Old, Television, Years)
"I certainly know there are people in positions of power in the business who lack imagination and, perhaps as a result of that, think of me as 'David'. But I wouldn't really want to work with those people, you know?"
- Michael C. Hall
(Related: Business, Imagination, Power, Work, People, Result, Want)
"In imagination, there's no limitation."
- Mark Victor Hansen
(Related: Imagination)
"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination."
- Eduard Hanslick
(Related: Art, Imagination, Feelings, Contemplation)
"Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly."
- Eduard Hanslick
(Related: Imagination, Feelings)
"I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it."
- Keith Haring
(Related: Art, Imagination, Soul, People, Humanity, Propaganda)
"You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent."
- Renny Harlin
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Time, Talent, Individuality, Want)
"In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down."
- Phil Harris
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Thought, Development)
"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."
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
(Related: Intelligence, Imagination, Love, Danger, Kindness, Relationships, Will)
"Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination."
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
(Related: Imagination, Dress, Reality, World)
"President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions."
- Dennis Hastert
(Related: Imagination, Time, Leadership, People, Vision, American, President, World)
"I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Imagination, Fiction)
"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."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Imagination, Devil, Man)
"Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right."
- Shirley Hazzard
(Related: Imagination, Love, Intelligence, Truth, Fact, Right)
"Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare."
- Frederick Henry Hedge
(Related: Men, Imagination, Power, Act, Man, Shakespeare, Waking)
"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Imagination, Ability, Cowardice)
"Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction."
- Jimi Hendrix
(Related: Imagination, Science, Fiction, Key, Rest)
"A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning."
- Brad Henry
(Related: Love, Imagination, Hope, Learning)
"Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves."
- Bill Hicks
(Related: Imagination, Life, Dream)
"My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people."
- Patricia Highsmith
(Related: Imagination, People)
"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."
- Napoleon Hill
(Related: Imagination, Thought, Ideas, Beginning, First, Reality, Will)
"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."
- Napoleon Hill
(Related: Imagination, Life, Wealth, Accomplishment, Energy, Mind)
"I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money."
- S. E. Hinton
(Related: Money, Imagination, Feelings, Idea, Old)
"The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination."
- Richard Hofstadter
(Related: Imagination, Character, Corruption, University, World)
"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Imagination, Memories, Old, Sense)
"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination."
- Edward Hopper
(Related: Imagination, Invention)
"Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality."
- Irving Howe
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"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."
- Vanessa Hudgens
(Related: Imagination, Horror)
"Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Wife, Memory)
"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."
- David Hume
(Related: Imagination, Belief, Nothing)
"There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination."
- Leigh Hunt
(Related: Imagination, Measure, World)
"It's just a way of trying to get to a third thing that's not particular to any quote-unquote genre. It's been great for me; it's really opened me up and gotten me to use that part of my imagination. It's very scary in a lot of ways, and just as exciting."
- Charlie Hunter
(Related: Imagination, Trying)
"The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Imagination, Limits)
"A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination."
- Ada Louise Huxtable
(Related: Imagination, Disaster)
"I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography."
- John Irving
(Related: Imagination, Biography, World)
"He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Senses)
"Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination."
- Christopher Isherwood
(Related: Imagination, Life, Luck)
"I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid."
- Janet Jackson
(Related: Imagination, Pretty)
"Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it's always been there. It's been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had."
- Janet Jackson
(Related: Imagination, Life, Being, Old, Years)
"Ultimately it's a leap of faith and a leap of imagination to put yourself back in time into those conditions and situations and see how you would react."
- Derek Jacobi
(Related: Faith, Imagination, Time)
"I am an actor and I live in the world of pretend in my working capacity. I live in the world of my imagination."
- Derek Jacobi
(Related: Imagination, Actor, World)
"Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination."
- Derek Jacobi
(Related: Imagination, Actor, Detail, Land, Sense)
"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."
- Henry James
(Related: Nature, Imagination, Civilization, American, Country, Literary, Secrets, Will, Yield)
"Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it."
- Robinson Jeffers
(Related: Imagination, Mind, Solitude)
"The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory."
- Thomas Jefferson
(Related: Imagination, Theory)
"Although I do not have a family, I have eyes, ears and imagination, and know, as most people know, that the importance of one's children is paramount."
- Lara St. John
(Related: Family, Imagination, People, Children, Eyes, Importance)
"The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South."
- James Weldon Johnson
(Related: Imagination, Friends, University)
"Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine."
- Ron Johnson
(Related: Imagination, Innovation, Reality)
"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Imagination, May, Reality, Thinking)
"Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Imagination, Man)
"One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Imagination, Feet, Learning)
"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Imagination, Feet, Learning)
"Imagination is the eye of the soul."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Imagination, Soul, Eye)
"Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world."
- Ashley Judd
(Related: Imagination, Fact, Understanding, Variety, World)
"The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."
- Carl Jung
(Related: Imagination, Debt, Play)
"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."
- Carl Jung
(Related: Imagination, Work, Debt, Fantasy, Play)
"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination."
- Carl Jung
(Related: Imagination, Fantasy, Man, Right)
"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Imagination, Misfortune)
"My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias."
- Abdul Kalam
(Related: Age, Imagination, Optimism)
"As an actor I think sometimes producers need a little bit of encouragement to see you in a particular role, they may not have as much imagination as you would expect."
- Steve Kanaly
(Related: Imagination, Actor, Encouragement, May)
"Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination."
- Bob Kane
(Related: Imagination, Ideas)
"Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination."
- Immanuel Kant
(Related: Happiness, Imagination, Reason)
"What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination."
- Jeffrey Katzenberg
(Related: Imagination, Love, Animation)
"You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination."
- Charles Keating
(Related: Imagination, Actor)
"My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."
- John Keats
(Related: Imagination)
"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth."
- John Keats
(Related: Beauty, Imagination, Truth)
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination."
- John Keats
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Heart, Holiness, Nothing)
"He brought imagination to the story of the Creation."
- Harvey Keitel
(Related: Imagination, Creation)
"Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Imagination, War, People, Force, Propaganda, Terror)
"The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer."
- Charles Kettering
(Related: Imagination, Man)
"Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."
- Charles Kettering
(Related: Imagination, Hope, Future)
"When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination."
- Ellen Key
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Nicole Kidman
(Related: Imagination, Men, Thought, Leading, Parents, Writer)
"The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business."
- Thomas Kinkade
(Related: Business, Imagination, Opportunity, Challenge, Lies, Painting)
"Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did."
- Eartha Kitt
(Related: Imagination, Power, Successful, School)
"It will take some time before a politician will capture the imagination of the American people and have the vision and understanding to do what is necessary for a better future for the people of America and the world."
- David Korten
(Related: Imagination, Time, People, Vision, America, American, Future, Understanding, Will, World)
"I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening."
- Jerzy Kosinski
(Related: History, Imagination, Evening, Past)
"Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination."
- Sofia Kovalevskaya
(Related: Imagination, Science, Opportunity, Arithmetic, Mathematics, Reality)
"So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Experience, Work, Imagination, Artists)
"But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Imagination, Music, People, Song, Want)
"The development of beauty in chess never depends on you alone. No matter how much imagination and creativity you invest, you still do not create beauty. Your opponent must react at the same highest level."
- Vladimir Kramnik
(Related: Beauty, Imagination, Development, Creativity, Chess)
"Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Imagination, Fantasy, Heaven, Now)
"If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Imagination, Life, Truth, Lies)
"Imagination has a great deal to do with winning."
- Mike Krzyzewski
(Related: Imagination, Winning)
"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."
- Mike Krzyzewski
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Milan Kundera
(Related: Imagination, Compassion, Nothing, Pain)
"I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination."
- Steve Lacy
(Related: Imagination, Possibilities, Years)
"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."
- Karl Lagerfeld
(Related: Imagination, Order)
"Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that."
- R. D. Laing
(Related: Love, Imagination, Children, Curiosity)
"If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination."
- Hedy Lamarr
(Related: Imagination, Hope)
"As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."
- Ursula K. LeGuin
(Related: Imagination, Hope, Perception, Children, Compassion, Scientists)
"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."
- Vivien Leigh
(Related: Imagination, Shakespeare, Training)
"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
- John Lennon
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination."
- Sam Levenson
(Related: Imagination, Being, Facts)
"Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Art, Imagination, Philosophy)
"Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Imagination, Men, Artists)
"Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Meaning, Order, Reason)
"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."
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Related: Imagination, People, Poor)
"You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: Imagination, Change, Character, Acting, Being, First, Teachers)
"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."
- Juliette G. Low
(Related: Love, Imagination, Will)
"One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?"
- Francis Cabot Lowell
(Related: Imagination, Goals, Beginning, Garden)
"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."
- James Russell Lowell
(Related: Imagination, Society, Character, Solitude)
"Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points."
- Percival Lowell
(Related: Imagination, Science, Learning)
"I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?"
- Ernst Lubitsch
(Related: Help)
"If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers."
- Bela Lugosi
(Related: Imagination, Enemy)
"No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination."
- Anne Sullivan Macy
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Thought, Knowledge, Ideas, May, Trying)
"They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Experience, Imagination, People, Variety)
"One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm."
- Ella Maillart
(Related: Imagination, Enthusiasm, Routine)
"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."
- Maimonides
(Related: Imagination, Astronomy, Doubt, Necessity, Physics, Providence, Reality, Will, World)
"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."
- Maxwell Maltz
(Related: Imagination, Goal, Act, Will)
"It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more."
- Edouard Manet
(Related: Imagination, Science, Feeling, Worth)
"Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities."
- Orison Swett Marden
(Related: Imagination, Thoughts, Limits, Possibilities)
"I have enough love to last me a lifetime! Thank God I'll never lose my imagination and my passion. That's really what it is. I'm still passionate about what I do."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Imagination, Love, God, Passion)
"Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together."
- Jacques Maritain
(Related: Poetry, Imagination, Love, Blood, Desire, Instinct, Intellect, Man, Sense, Spirit)
"What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out."
- Wynton Marsalis
(Related: Imagination, Music, Understanding)
"There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination."
- Eddie Marsan
(Related: Imagination, Work, Acting, Mystery, Questions)
"It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people."
- Olivier Martinez
(Related: Dreams, Imagination, Time, People, Vision, Want)
"Imagination creates some big monsters."
- Olivier Martinez
(Related: Imagination)
"Love is based on imagination."
- Olivier Martinez
(Related: Imagination, Love)
"Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop."
- Marcello Mastroianni
(Related: Imagination, Sun, Woman)
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Imagination, Belief, Exercise)
"George has only got to ring me. His imagination is so wonderful, I'd do any character he might create."
- Peter Mayhew
(Related: Imagination, Character)
"In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination."
- Colleen McCullough
(Related: Imagination, Love, Birds, Heaven, Hell, Saying)
"Politics is the enemy of the imagination."
- Ian Mcewan
(Related: Imagination, Politics, Enemy)
"The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination."
- Bryant H. McGill
(Related: Imagination, Measure, World)
"But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there."
- Roger McGuinn
(Related: Imagination, People, Folk, Old, Songs)
"You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination."
- Larry McMurtry
(Related: Imagination, Country, First, Want)
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
- H. L. Mencken
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Love)
"The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination."
- George Meredith
(Related: Death, Imagination, Love, Disaster)
"And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."
- James Merrill
(Related: Imagination, Spirits)
"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."
- Thomas Merton
(Related: Imagination, Men, Time, Being, Result, Usefulness)
"I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination."
- Breckin Meyer
(Related: Imagination, First, Information, Reading, Variety, World)
"I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see."
- Duane Michals
(Related: Imagination)
"The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination."
- James A. Michener
(Related: Experience, Imagination, People, Writers)
"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Imagination, God, Voice)
"Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Imagination, Feeling, Future)
"But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination."
- Laura Miller
(Related: Imagination, Love, Children)
"When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist."
- Andrea Mitchell
(Related: Imagination, War, Power, Civil rights, Fire, Vietnam)
"We especially need imagination in science."
- Maria Mitchell
(Related: Imagination, Science)
"When I was on my own in a hotel room in Romania, I had the imagination to keep myself occupied."
- Rhona Mitra
(Related: Imagination)
"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."
- Maria Montessori
(Related: Beauty, Imagination, Poetry, Science, Logic, Mathematics)
"True change takes place in the imagination."
- Thomas Moore
(Related: Change, Imagination)
"If they want to talk about aliens and anything like that... that's part of the gift God gave us. That's what makes life exciting. We're pretty stuck, you know. What gives flight to our life is our imagination."
- Michael Moriarty
(Related: Imagination, Life, God, Pretty, Talk, Want)
"Every view, and every object I studied attentively, by viewing them again and again on every side, for I was anxious to make a lasting impression of it on my imagination."
- Karl Philipp Moritz
(Related: Imagination, Impression)
"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."
- William Morris
(Related: Imagination, Work, Soul, Body, Help, Man, Memory, Mind, Will)
"The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport."
- Van Morrison
(Related: Imagination, Music, First)
"War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination."
- Bill Moyers
(Related: Imagination, War, Failure, Self)
"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."
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Love, Genius, Soul)
"The power of imagination makes us infinite."
- John Muir
(Related: Imagination, Power, Infinite)
"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."
- Iris Murdoch
(Related: Art, Death, Imagination, Fantasy, Pornography)
"The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece."
- Gilbert Murray
(Related: Imagination, Direction, Greece, Road)
"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."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Imagination, Life, Delight, Order)
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Imagination, Writer)
"You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist."
- Azar Nafisi
(Related: Imagination, Future, Order)
"To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination."
- George Jean Nathan
(Related: Art, Imagination, Sex, Morals)
"Yes, I was correctly quoted in saying I introduced sex into films in the 20's, but it was sex in good taste and left a great deal to one's imagination."
- Pola Negri
(Related: Imagination, Sex, Saying, Taste)
"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."
- Jack Nicholson
(Related: Imagination, People, Character, Trouble)
"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."
- Anais Nin
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"The Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories."
- Jeremy Northam
(Related: Drama, Memories)
"I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination."
- Don Novello
(Related: Imagination, Books)
"The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things."
- Robert Nozick
(Related: Relativity, Scientists, Theory)
"I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do."
- Trevor Nunn
(Related: Imagination, Project)
"There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen."
- Sean O'Faolain
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure."
- Ben Okri
(Related: Imagination, Failure, Artist, Tools, Will)
"Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art."
- Austin O'Malley
(Related: Art, Imagination, Harvest, Plants, Reason, Wilderness)
"It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income."
- Leonard Orr
(Related: Imagination, Debt, Income)
"If there is a book that the script came from you have to read it, you have to see what you can get out of it: mood, back story and things that may not even be in the film. They kick off your imagination and broaden the character, I think."
- Miranda Otto
(Related: Imagination, Character, Film, May)
"A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations."
- Russell Page
(Related: Imagination, Eye, Needs)
"Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth."
- Camille Paglia
(Related: Art, Imagination, Nature, Feminism, Myth)
"Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature."
- Camille Paglia
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Action, Freedom, Pornography, Protest)
"Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love."
- Gilbert Parker
(Related: Imagination, Love)
"Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Imagination, Men, Heart, Being)
"Imagination decides everything."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Imagination)
"Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Imagination, Beauty, Happiness, Justice, World)
"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?"
- Cesare Pavese
(Related: Life, Imagination, Children, Moments, World)
"Imagination is the true magic carpet."
- Norman Vincent Peale
(Related: Imagination, Magic)
"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."
- Norman Vincent Peale
(Related: Imagination, Mind, Obstacles, Will)
"It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that."
- Robin Wright Penn
(Related: Imagination, Nothing)
"A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination."
- Arthur W. Pinero
(Related: Imagination)
"Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels."
- Luigi Pirandello
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Work, Creation)
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
- Sylvia Plath
(Related: Imagination, Life, Creativity, Enemy, Self)
"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."
- Plato
(Related: Life, Music, Imagination, Soul, Charm, Law, Mind, Universe)
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Imagination, Time, Mob)
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Poetry, Imagination, Religion, Fear, Friend, Fraud, Greed)
"The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Act)
"For me, my travels have been the chance to go to a place that already exists in my imagination."
- Hugo Pratt
(Related: Imagination, Chance)
"Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Imagination, Opportunity, Ideas, Childhood, Language, Play, Problems, Writing)
"Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Imagination)
"Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination."
- Marcel Proust
(Related: Imagination, Men, Women, Pretty)
"For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Imagination, Fiction, Order, Unconscious)
"To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination."
- Quintilian
(Related: Imagination, Mind, Promise)
"I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive."
- Man Ray
(Related: Imagination, Dreams, Unconscious)
"There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder."
- Ronald Reagan
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Growth, Limits, Wonder)
"Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination."
- Ishmael Reed
(Related: Imagination, Poetry, Labor, Writing)
"While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot."
- Frank Rich
(Related: Imagination, Fear, Americans, Nothing, Play, Riot)
"The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized."
- Mary Richards
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence."
- Eddie Rickenbacker
(Related: Imagination, Character, Independence, Individuality)
"One longs for a director with a sense of imagination."
- Alan Rickman
(Related: Imagination, Sense)
"Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination."
- Tim Robbins
(Related: Art, Imagination, Film, Soldiers)
"People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up."
- Tom Robbins
(Related: Imagination, People)
"The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment."
- Tony Robbins
(Related: Imagination, Commitment)
"A clever, imagination, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds."
- Percy Ross
(Related: Imagination, Open)
"The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery was a subconscious feeling for the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man."
- Bruno Rossi
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Motivation, Wealth, Discovery, Feeling, Man)
"Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts."
- Philip Roth
(Related: Imagination, Experience, Facts, Memories, Past)
"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
(Related: Imagination, Limits, Reality, World)
"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."
- Helen Rowland
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Man, May, Vanity, Woman)
"Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense."
- Helen Rowland
(Related: Imagination, Love, Common sense)
"I'm not claiming that football is the nation's salvation in this area, but it's one of them, one little thing that apparently has captured the imagination of a large sector of our society. But when football can't be a relatively pure outlet, a fun thing, then it hurts itself."
- Pete Rozelle
(Related: Imagination, Society, Football, Fun, Salvation)
"I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination."
- Mark Ruffalo
(Related: Imagination, Idea, School)
"What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry."
- Salman Rushdie
(Related: Imagination, Artist, First, Sensibility, Tenderness)
"My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination."
- Richard Russo
(Related: Imagination, Books, May, Memory, Sense)
"Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind."
- Joseph Franklin Rutherford
(Related: Imagination, God)
"The costume that I wear on the show is a little snug and doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination. I don't have a problem with it because of the way this character's been written."
- Jeri Ryan
(Related: Imagination, Character)
"Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction."
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Fiction)
"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?"
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Imagination, Joy, Now)
"Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination."
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Happiness, Imagination, Work)
"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."
- Marquis de Sade
(Related: Imagination, Fact, Lies, Man, Sight)
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
- Carl Sagan
(Related: Imagination, Will)
"Digital imaging allows both groups to rise above the limitations of mess and clutter and mechanics, and apply our talents to creating images limited only by our imaginations."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Limitations)
"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
- Jonas Salk
(Related: Dreams, Imagination, Courage, Hope, Lies, Reality)
"There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality."
- Jonas Salk
(Related: Dreams, Imagination, Courage, Hope, Reality)
"I loved the world of imagination."
- R. A. Salvatore
(Related: Imagination, World)
"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."
- George Santayana
(Related: Imagination, Dignity, End, Importance, Measure, Reality)
"When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you."
- Susan Sarandon
(Related: Imagination, Empathy, World)
"I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist."
- Susan Sarandon
(Related: Imagination, Acting, Actor, Empathy)
"Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Imagination, Character, Appearance, Divinity, Wit, Witty)
"It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own."
- Julian Schnabel
(Related: Imagination, Time, Art, Work, Possibility, Horror, Job, Luxury)
"I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can."
- Franz Schubert
(Related: Imagination)
"My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art."
- Clara Schumann
(Related: Art, Happiness, Imagination, Living)
"A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing."
- Charles M. Schwab
(Related: Business, Imagination, Dream, Successful, Vision, Man)
"You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do."
- Dougray Scott
(Related: Imagination, Movies, Hell, Historians)
"On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer."
- Bobby Seale
(Related: Imagination, People, Help, Police)
"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: Imagination, Hurt, Reality)
"Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself."
- Rod Serling
(Related: Imagination, Limits, Mind)
"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me."
- Peter Shaffer
(Related: Imagination)
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact."
- William Shakespeare
(Related: Imagination)
"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."
- George Bernard Shaw
(Related: Imagination, Beginning, Creation, Desire, Will)
"I wouldn't say that I've had a tough life by any stretch of the imagination."
- Duncan Sheik
(Related: Imagination, Life)
"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Related: Imagination)
"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Related: Imagination, Reason)
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(Related: Imagination, Facts, Memory)
"In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true."
- Joe Shuster
(Related: Imagination, Movies, Games)
"In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination - very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted."
- Joe Shuster
(Related: Imagination, Beginning, Freedom)
"People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination."
- Curtis Sittenfeld
(Related: Imagination, People, Books, Credit, Memory)
"Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything."
- John Sladek
(Related: Fact, Nothing, Poverty)
"Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only."
- Agnes Smedley
(Related: Imagination, Desire, Russia)
"This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts."
- Adam Smith
(Related: Imagination, Facts)
"Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin."
- William Robertson Smith
(Related: Imagination, Religion, Ideas, Effort, Present, Ritual, Sense, Sin, Worship)
"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."
- Stephen Sondheim
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Meaning)
"Further, for once, I like the idea that people who think I'm a constant voice for the furthering of the imagination have to see that interest in a more materialistic fashion."
- Peter Sotos
(Related: Imagination, People, Idea, Fashion, Interest, Voice)
"It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination."
- Robert South
(Related: Imagination, Work, Fancy, Judgment)
"Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage."
- Timothy Spall
(Related: Imagination)
"The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible."
- Steven Spielberg
(Related: Imagination, Appetite, Public, Reality)
"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."
- Baruch Spinoza
(Related: Beauty, Imagination, Nature, Confusion, Order, Ugly)
"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."
- Bruce Springsteen
(Related: Imagination, Attention, Buying, Curiosity, Name)
"Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination."
- Lionel Stander
(Related: Imagination)
"If you got a good imagination, a lot of confidence and you kind of know what you are saying, then you might be able to do it. I know a lot of colorful characters at home that would make great actors."
- Jason Statham
(Related: Home, Imagination, Actors, Confidence, Saying)
"Agents and producers have to get you into a box to accommodate their limited imaginations."
- Imelda Staunton
"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."
- Gloria Steinem
(Related: Imagination, Excitement, Planning, Possibilities)
"In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Words, World)
"The imagination is man's power over nature."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Power, Man)
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Imagination, Life, Metaphysics, Mind)
"We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark."
- Wallace Stevens
(Related: Imagination, God)
"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
- Tom Stoppard
(Related: Art, Imagination, Skill)
"I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me."
- Meryl Streep
(Related: Imagination, Mother, Children)
"To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination."
- Donald Sutherland
(Related: Imagination)
"The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place."
- Matthew Sweet
(Related: Imagination, College, Growing up, Liberal)
"All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination."
- Wislawa Szymborska
(Related: Imagination, Agreement, Reality)
"I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from."
- Amy Tan
(Related: Imagination, Ideas)
"Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible."
- Ida Tarbell
(Related: Imagination, Future, Key)
"Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them."
- Laurette Taylor
(Related: Imagination, Beauty, Personality)
"Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage."
- Ellen Terry
(Related: Success, Thought, First, Years)
"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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Imagination, Actions, Feeling, Karma, Thinking, Unconscious)
"Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Imagination, Failure, Catastrophes)
"But who can paint like Nature? Can imagination boast, amid its gay creation, hues like hers?"
- James Thomson
(Related: Imagination, Nature, Creation, Gay)
"It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Being, First)
"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Imagination, World)
"Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Imagination, Wilderness)
"My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical."
- Michael Tippett
(Related: Imagination, Society, Age, Tradition)
"Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading."
- Michael Tippett
(Related: Imagination, Country, Reading, Shakespeare)
"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?"
- Ernst Toller
(Related: Imagination, Mother, People)
"Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination."
- Lily Tomlin
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Arnold J. Toynbee
(Related: Imagination, Enthusiasm, Apathy, First, Practice)
"To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness."
- Thomas Traherne
(Related: Happiness, Imagination, Present, World)
"The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction."
- William Trevor
(Related: Imagination, Fiction, Thinking, Understanding)
"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination."
- Lionel Trilling
(Related: Imagination, Ideas, Class, Connection, Deep)
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand."
- Harry S. Truman
(Related: Imagination, Fear, Courage, Determination, America, Job)
"A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate."
- Donald Trump
(Related: Imagination)
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Imagination, Eyes, Focus)
"Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination."
- Evelyn Underhill
(Related: Imagination, Forget, Key, Lies, Will)
"Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful."
- Jack Vance
(Related: Imagination, Writer)
"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"
- Leonardo da Vinci
(Related: Dreams, Imagination, Eye)
"The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test."
- Stephen Vizinczey
(Related: Life, Character, Virtue, Name, Needs)
"Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination."
- Voltaire
(Related: Imagination, Love, Nature)
"Imagination creates reality."
- Richard Wagner
(Related: Imagination, Reality)
"You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization."
- Denis Waitley
(Related: Imagination, Dreams, Innovation, Reason, World)
"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: English, Language, Property)
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
- Horace Walpole
(Related: Humor, Imagination, Man, Sense)
"I mean, the most important thing to me is imagination."
- Rob Walton
(Related: Imagination)
"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."
- William Warburton
(Related: Imagination, Enthusiasm, Judgment, Mind, Temper)
"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination."
- Alan Watts
(Related: Imagination, Money, People, Wealth, Poverty, Reason)
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Imagination, Life, Fiction)
"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."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Imagination, Life, History, Influence, Needs)
"Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana."
- James Welch
(Related: Imagination, Desire, Language, Montana, Writer)
"I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea."
- H. G. Wells
(Related: Imagination, Sea)
"When you're young you have no worries, no drama, only your imagination. It's the best!"
- Devon Werkheiser
(Related: Imagination, Drama)
"Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse."
- Mary Wesley
(Related: Imagination, Love, Life, Play, Want)
"I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination."
- Mary Wesley
(Related: Imagination)
"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Imagination, Work, Future, Past)
"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."
- Edith Wharton
(Related: Imagination, Destiny, Man, Moments)
"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Imagination, Knowledge, Act, Fools)
"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Imagination, Spirit)
"People can't just listen to the music and have their own imagination and take them where they wanna go."
- Ann Wilson
(Related: Imagination, Music, People)
"The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination."
- Edmund Wilson
(Related: Imagination, Vision)
"The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society."
- Edmund Wilson
(Related: Imagination, Society, Possibility)
"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Imagination, Word)
"Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it."
- Terry Wogan
(Related: Imagination, Television)
"Only in your imagination can you revise."
- Fay Wray
(Related: Imagination)
"Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it."
- Francis Wright
(Related: Action, Belief, Actions, Consequences, First, Force, Judgment, Religious, Right, Sensations, Wrong)
"Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not."
- Francis Wright
(Related: Errors, Facts)
"An idea is salvation by imagination."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(Related: Imagination, Idea, Salvation)
"The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination."
- Richard Wright
(Related: Imagination, Artist)
"It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
(Related: Women, Imagination, People)
"I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free."
- Andrew Wyeth
(Related: Work, Imagination, Truth)
"I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare."
- Andrew Wyeth
(Related: History, Imagination, Father, Shakespeare, World)
"When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination."
- Ahmet Zappa
(Related: Imagination)
"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."
- Peter Nivio Zarlenga
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Eyes)
"Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds."
- Zig Ziglar
(Related: Life, Men)
"I don't think that people should wear dresses two sizes too small. I just think that sexiness is better left to the imagination. It's just more tasteful."
- Rachel Zoe
(Related: Imagination, People)
"I have learned the art of filling in your lines with your visuals and your movies and your imagination."
- Daphne Zuniga
(Related: Art, Imagination, Movies)