Imagination Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Albert Einstein

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Samuel Johnson

Catherine the Great

Edgar Allan Poe

L. Frank Baum

Felix Bloch

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. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

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

Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

Catherine the Great

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein

Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. There will come with the greater love of science greater love to one another. Living more nearly to Nature is living farther from the world and from its follies, but nearer to the world's people; it is to be of them, with them, and for them, and especially for their improvement. We cannot see how impartially Nature gives of her riches to all, without loving all, and helping all; and if we cannot learn through Nature's laws the certainty of spiritual truths, we can at least learn to promote spiritual growth while we are together, and live in a trusting hope of a greater growth in the future.

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Luigi Pirandello

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

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.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.

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.

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

Elizabeth A. Drew

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

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

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.

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

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

James A. Michener

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Edward Dahlberg

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.

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

Gaston Bachelard

The will is never free — it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car — it can't steer. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers.