quotations about imagination
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
Springing from the provinces and principalities of the unconscious, imagination takes us from what we know to the infinite realm of what we do not know.
WILLIAM HOFFMAN & LEO FURCHT
The Biologist's Imagination
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed -- or cursed -- with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.
JOHN L. MASON
You're Born an Original
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.
GEORGE ELIOT
Theophrastus Such
Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
Imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
STEVE MARTIN
An Object of Beauty
Imagination has great power. If you make a picture in the mind, the vibrations of the body may adjust to it if the will is directed that way, as in thoughts of health or sickness.
ELSA BARKER
Letters from a Living Dead Man
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
ANAIS NIN
Henry and June
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Character of Physical Law
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Paris Review, fall/winter 1978
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
MARCEL PROUST
The Captive & The Fugitive
Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
RICHARD RORTY
introduction, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers
People speak of imagination with praise, as an attainment or attribute of great men whose ability and power have shaped destinies of nations and the world; and the same people will speak of it as being the characteristic of others who are not practical, who have vagrant fancies and weak minds; that the visions of such are of no use, their dreams never materialize, they expect what never happens; and, they are looked on with pity or contempt.
H. W. PERCIVAL
"Imagination", The Word
Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
Selected Tales
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets.
JULIEN OFFRAY DE LA METTRIE
Man a Machine