Imagination Quotes

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He had detected a certain sensitivity, a capacity for imagination, in the the girl in New York. But the years and the roads, the bars and the cars and the beds and the bottles—they all have flinty edges, and they are the cruel upholstery in the dark tunnel down which the soul rolls and tumbles until no more abrasion is possible, until the ultimate hardness is achieved. So here she sat, having achieved the bland defensive heartiness of a ten–dollar whore.

John D. MacDonald

Her imagination modeled no pleasing features upon the ugly skull of matrimony.

Gertrude Atherton

I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The Historian of Shivaji at the end of a careful study of all the records about him in eight different languages, is bound to admit that Shivaji was not only the maker of the Maratha nation, but also the greatest constructive genius of medieval India. States fall, empires break up, dynasties become extinct, but the memory of a true hero as King like Shivaji remains an imperishable historical legacy for the entire human race. – The pillar of people's hope. The center of a world's desire, to animate the heart, to kindle the imagination, and to inspire the brain of succeeding ages to the highest endeavors.

Jadunath Sarkar

Worship is yet another paradox of the religious life: it is simultaneously the greatest duty and the greatest pleasure of faith. Worship is the act of truly loving God. Believe in this brilliant Being, this magnificent "higher power," who not only created us but nurtures us with care and intelligence beyond our imagination, and obviously we are called to worship Him.

It is not particularly satisfactory to see equations set forth as direct results of observation and experiment, where we used to get long mathematical deductions as apparent proofs of them. Nevertheless, I believe that we cannot, without deceiving ourselves, extract much more from known facts than is asserted in the papers referred to. If we wish to lend more color to the theory, there is nothing to prevent us from supplementing all this and aiding our powers of imagination by concrete representations of the various conceptions as to the nature of electric polarisation, the electric current, etc.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Adam Johnson (writer)

I had always dared to dream large, but even this black kid's imagination could not have come close to inventing the storybook success that I have enjoyed in the nearly thirty years I've worked in this medium I adore.

This alone is to be feared — the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of the spirit. The death of the body is to that, I think, a little thing.

Winifred Holtby

To the degree that a man possesses a vivid ideal of the good life, submerges himself in the sea of human misery and endeavors to alleviate suffering, kindles imagination in hours of silence and by visions of beauty, and follows the noblest personality into the presence of a loving, suffering Father—to the extent that he lives meaningfully, he will be convinced of sin and cry aloud for deliverance.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.

In the fraudulent Manichaeanism of Reason and Revelation, each the light to the other's dark, each more like the other than it knows, the Imagination seeks to be a decisive rupture.

Religion has no limits, and no bounds;—
The vast, the infinite, and the eternal.,
Never from her may Genius separate.
Imagination from its earliest flight,
Past o'er the bounds of life : and the sublime
Is the reflection of divinity.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids—structurally, politically, violently—the broad posing of this question.

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of the heart.

No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.

Yes, there is some truth to the accusation that I resented being bypassed for Groat in 1960. He had a good season but the records will show I contributed a lot more to winning the pennant. I think, too, that a lot of the writers were moved by their racial feelings. An MVP endorsement looks good in the record of a potential manager, and it'll be a long time before we have a colored manager; longer still before there will be a colored Puerto Rican manager. Anyway, it wasn't my 'imagination' hurting me when I complained, it really was my neck. [...] And the doctor says the wrenching of my neck was caused by some unconscious adjustment I had been trying to make because of my back.

Roberto Clemente

There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. But put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I'd had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW

Why be narrow-minded, why cut ourselves off from any of these rich heritages when… we have the freedom to make the most of the best in all techniques? There are no prohibitions against it. All it takes is a little wisdom, imagination and courageous experimentation.

Michael Chekhov

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.

I am beginning to think of the creative imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.