Imagination Quotes

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The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and farehard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Bertrand Russell

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.

Emily Dickinson

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

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this — that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare

The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

Simone de Beauvoir

People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage.
I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

Vincent van Gogh

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which—can supply the lack of the others.

William Faulkner

Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

Leonardo da Vinci

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

G. K. Chesterton

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, 'progress' would become mechanical and trivial.

Bertrand Russell

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.

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

Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.