Imagination Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Leonardo da Vinci

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

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

Simone de Beauvoir

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.

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

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Bertrand Russell

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.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

O! who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer's heat? O, no! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

William Shakespeare

I believe myself that romantic love is the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer. In the relation of a man and woman who love each other with passion and imagination and tenderness, there is something of inestimable value, to be ignorant of which is a great misfortune to any human being.

Bertrand Russell

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Stephen Hawking

The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case, which is why leverage often requires imagination, and salesmanship.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Albert Einstein

The value of the products of our imagination depends, of course, on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntary [combinations of] them...

All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.

G. K. Chesterton

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Henry David Thoreau

You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.

Winston Churchill

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.

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

Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience.

Eleanor Roosevelt