Imagination Quotes

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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.

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.

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.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination — or to intelligence, to love — than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

Shirley Hazzard

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

Luigi Pirandello

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

Siegfried Sassoon

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

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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.

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

Gaston Bachelard

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. 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 by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers..

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

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

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

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points.

Percival Lowell

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