Imagination Quotes

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

~ Azar Nafisi

Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.

~ Virginia Woolf

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity, and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

This is a place of true imagination.

~ Rene Denfeld

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

~ Salman Rushdie

They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.

~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

To see things as they really were--what an empoverishment!

~ L.p. Hartley

We dream — it is good we are dreaming —It would hurt us — were we awake —But since it is playing — kill us,And we are playing — shriek —What harm? Men die — externally —It is a truth — of Blood —But we — are dying in Drama —And Drama — is never dead —Cautious — We jar each other —And either — open the eyes —Lest the Phantasm — prove the Mistake —And the livid SurpriseCool us to Shafts of Granite —With just an Age — and Name —And perhaps a phrase in Egyptian —It's prudenter — to dream —

~ Emily Dickinson

We _are_ rich,' said Anne staunchly. 'Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we are as happy as queens and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls - all silver and shallow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

~ L.m. Montgomery

What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.

~ Lynda Barry

I love when truth is stranger than fiction. It authenticates my wild imagination.

~ Joseph Difrancesco

Beyond your wildest imagination, there is something worth working for.

~ Gordon Attard

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

~ Paul Theroux

One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true-the joy of anticipating is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.

~ Maria Augusta Von Trapp

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

~ Arundhati Roy

He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination.

~ Raymond Queneau

Does progress mean that we dissolve our ancient myths? If we forget our legends, I fear that we shall close an important door to the imagination

~ James Christensen

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of nonsense. But they had been wrong.

~ Leslie Marmon Silko

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

~ Terence Mckenna

The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.

~ Beryl Markham

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.

~ Guy Davenport

Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel.

~ Félix J. Palma

Our imagination is dictated by who we are. (198)

~ Dai Sijie

If you can imagine a thing,then it has already existed,somewhere, somewhen, somehow.

~ Toba Beta

If you start most of your sentences with 'Why Can't', 'Why Not', or 'What if', you'll build a stronger imagination.

~ Corey Aaron Burkes

If-Then is a structured logic of humans' thought,who have memories and imagination in their mind. If both don't exist, Then this quote has never even been written.

~ Toba Beta

People are made in such a way that if something inexplicable happens to them, they write it off to an overheated imagination.

~ Max Frei

He who lacks imagination lives but half a life. He has his experiences, he has his facts, he has his learning. But do any of these really live unless touched by the magic of the imagination?

~ Paul Fenimore Cooper

The alarming lack of ideas that is recognizable in all acts of culture, politics, organization of life, and the rest is explained by this, and the weakness of the modernist constructers of functionalist cities is only a particularly visible example of it. Intelligent specialists only ever have the intelligence to play the game of specialists: hence the fearful conformity and fundamental lack of imagination that make them admit that this or that product is useful, good, necessary. In fact, the root of the reigning lack of imagination cannot be understood if one does not have access to the imagination of lack--that is to conceiving what is absent, forbidden, and hidden, and yet possible, in modern life.

~ Tom Mcdonough

Usually, the main problem with life conundrums is that we don't bring to them enough imagination

~ Thomas Moore

Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.

~ Alexandra Robbins

Lead's erasing then vanishingBanished from whatever it is they're drinking and it's cleanedRunning from the pitcher as if it's her fantasy

~ Criss Jami

Our imagination goes ahead of us, bringing our yesterday's imagings into present realities.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

To imagine is to risk being mentally blind.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

I fake fake to have a fake life. Does that make me a real horse? Buy now for $777, wooden saddle sold separately. Real horseshoes not included. Imaginary ones – neither.

~ Will Advise

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.

~ Algernon Blackwood

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

~ Adam Johnson

The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, you've got him. He's your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isn't a maiden you see before you, it's a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.

~ Joyce Cary