Quotes on imagination

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Author: Edward Abbey

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

Author: Franklin Adams

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

Author: John Adams

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.

Author: John Adams

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.

Author: Joseph Addison

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.

Author: Stella Adler

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

Author: Aesop

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.

Author: Thomas Aldrich

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Author: Muhammad Ali

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.

Author: Chris Allsburg

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.

Author: Kevin Anderson

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.

Author: Michael Apted

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.

Author: Louis Aragon

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.

Author: Matthew Ashford

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.

Author: Frank Auerbach

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

Author: Marcus Aurelius

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

Author: Jane Austen

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Author: Lauren Bacall

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Author: Gaston Bachelard

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.

Author: David Bailey

Imagination is the air of mind.

Author: Philip Bailey

I love the paranormal, because there, every genre I write can become one beacon for my imagination.

Author: Leslie Banks

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

Author: Clive Barker

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.

Author: Luigi Barzini

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.

Author: L. Baum

Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.

Author: Les Baxter

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

Author: Henry Beecher

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

Author: Daniel Bell

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.

Author: Dirk Benedict

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

Author: George Berkeley

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.

Author: John Bernal

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.

Author: Claude Bernard

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

Author: Ambrose Bierce

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

Author: Josh Billings

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.

Author: Algernon Blackwood

When you are young your imagination is so clear.

Author: Nina Blackwood

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.

Author: William Blake

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

Author: William Blake

Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure.

Author: Felix Bloch

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.

Author: Nellie Bly

The human race is governed by its imagination.

Author: Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagination rules the world.

Author: Napoleon Bonaparte

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.

Author: Matthew Bourne

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

Author: Christian Bovee

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.

Author: Ray Bradbury

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!"

Author: Bill Bradley

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.

Author: Tycho Brahe

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

Author: Dorthea Brande

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.

Author: Georg Brandes

Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.

Author: Terry Brooks

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

Author: Terry Brooks

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Author: Terry Brooks

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.

Author: Terry Brooks

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.

Author: James Broughton

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.

Author: Luis Bunuel

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

Author: Edmund Burke

Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.

Author: Edgar Burroghs

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

Author: John Burroughs

Embrace the unknown, for within it lies the possibility of true transformation.

Author: Sandra Cisneros

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.

Author: John Cameron

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

Author: Thomas Carlyle

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.

Author: Joyce Cary

My best investment is my imagination, because it has never failed to bring me my greatest returns!

Author: Randy Castillo

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.

Author: Bruce Catton

People can die of mere imagination.

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

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

Author: Lord Chesterfield

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.

Author: Noam Chomsky

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.

Author: Deepak Chopra

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

Author: Emile Cioran

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.

Author: John Clarke

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.

Author: Beverly Cleary

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Author: Alexander Cockburn

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

Author: Samuel Coleridge

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

Author: Samuel Coleridge

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.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

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

Author: Robert Collier

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.

Author: Robert Collier

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

Author: Billy Connolly

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

Author: Cyril Connolly

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.

Author: Charles Cooley

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

Author: Mason Cooley

Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it.

Author: Mason Cooley

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

Author: Mason Cooley

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

Author: Emile Coue

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.

Author: Alex Cox

Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is.

Author: Yvonne Craig

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!

Author: Robert Creeley

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

Author: e. cummings

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

Author: George Curtis

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.

Author: Claire Danes

When you believe in what you're doing and use your imagination and initiative, you can make a difference.

Author: Samuel Dash

Dare to dream beyond the boundaries of fear, for in the pursuit of the impossible, true greatness is found.

Author: Sarah Johnson

Life is a canvas; paint it with the colors of your imagination and passion.

Author: Michelle Williams

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit.

Author: Doris Day

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.

Author: James Dean

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.

Author: Edgar Degas

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

Author: John Dewey

I have a very vivid imagination.

Author: Janice Dickinson

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

Author: Annie Dillard

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

Author: Walt Disney

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.

Author: Robert Doisneau

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.

Author: Rita Dove

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Author: Arthur Doyle

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

Author: Arthur Doyle

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

Author: Elizabeth Drew

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

Author: Jean Dubuffet

I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination.

Author: Patty Duke

Embrace the chaos within you, for it holds the power to create a universe of infinite possibilities.

Author: Caroline Adams

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Author: Thomas Edison

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

Author: Albert Einstein

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

Author: Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Author: Albert Einstein

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

Author: Albert Einstein

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

Author: Albert Einstein

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Author: Albert Einstein

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.

Author: Kim Elizabeth

Man lives by imagination.

Author: Henry Ellis

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Author: Ralph Emerson

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.

Author: James Farmer, Jr.

The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.

Author: Sarah Fielding

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.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

She has no imagination and that means no compassion.

Author: Michael Foot

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.

Author: Henry Ford

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.

Author: Janet Frame

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

Author: Christopher Fry

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

Author: Cornelia Funke

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.

Author: Richard Gallienne

You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance.

Author: David Garrick

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Author: Martha Gellhorn

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Author: Henry George

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

Author: Theodore Gericault

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.

Author: Jerry Gillies

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.

Author: Jean Giraudoux

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.

Author: Fay Godwin

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.

Author: William Godwin

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.

Author: William Godwin

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Author: Johann Goethe

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Author: Johann Goethe

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

Author: Vincent Gogh

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

Author: Vincent Gogh

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.

Author: Michel Gondry

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.

Author: Al Gore

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

Author: Al Gore

A child who has never fantasized about having other parents is seriously lacking in imagination.

Author: Fred Gosman

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

Author: Catherine Great

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.

Author: Bruce Greenwood

The only limitations in life are the ones you create in your own mind.

Author: Lewis Carroll

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

Author: Ursula Guin

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Author: Ursula Guin

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

Author: Ursula Guin