quotations about imagination
Springing from the provinces and principalities of the unconscious, imagination takes us from what we know to the infinite realm of what we do not know.
WILLIAM HOFFMAN & LEO FURCHT
The Biologist's Imagination
Small towns harbor small imaginations.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.
JOHN L. MASON
You're Born an Original
Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
MARCEL PROUST
The Captive & The Fugitive
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
ANAIS NIN
Henry and June
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed -- or cursed -- with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Character of Physical Law
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
On Science
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
RICHARD RORTY
introduction, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Selected Tales
This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Imagination can be developed. Those who have little may develop much. Those who have much may develop more.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word