Imagination Quotes

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You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell!

On his method of composition

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The true function of logic … as applied to matters of experience … is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

Bertrand Russell

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Time destroys the figments of the imagination, while confirming the judgments of nature.

We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight.

Eleanor Roosevelt

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

Michel de Montaigne

In love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart; and if either is outraged the other will be estranged. It is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart,--it is so much the more sensitive.

Henry David Thoreau

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.

The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination. The imagination knows--nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry--and it controls the breast.

Henry David Thoreau

Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking… Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

The waking man looks without fear at this offspring of his lawless Imagination; for he knows that they are but vain Spectres of his weakness.

Pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

William Shakespeare

His imagination is a perfect volcano, and to make discoveries in the interest of geology he would sacrifice his life.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

G. K. Chesterton

Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive.

No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.