Imagination Quotes

Lo, which a greet thing is affeccioun!Men may die of imaginacioun,So depe may impressioun be take.

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Most of the time it may seem like I'm staring into nothingness, but there's a whole world playing out in my head.

~ Aneta Cruz

I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer.

~ Thomas Hardy

Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.

~ Aneta Cruz

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist.

~ Henry De Vere Stacpoole

He imagines Owens' body dotted with saltwater reservoirs just below the skin. An entire wetland, populated with tiny fish and birds, thriving in his agitation. A species of dwarf crocodile lazing beside an artery.

~ Lisa Lang

Yeah, right. Instead of watching TV, we'll practice our weird magical powers. Great. What's next? Zooming around on flying carpets?

~ Malia Ann Haberman

Good stories take your imagination to anywhere

~ Raphaela Mello

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

~ C.s. Lewis

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

~ Michael Chabon

We may see a Creature with forty-nine headsWho lives in the desolate snow,And whenever he catches a cold (which he dreads)He has forty-nine noses to blow.'We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted ScrunchWho can chew up a man with one bite.It likes to eat five of them roasted for lunchAnd eighteen for its supper at night.'We may see a Dragon, and nobody knowsThat we won't see a Unicorn there.We may see a terrible Monster with toesGrowing out of the tufts of his hair.'We may see the sweet little Biddy-Bright HenSo playful, so kind and well-bred;And such beautiful eggs! You just boil them and thenThey explode and they blow off your head.'A Gnu and a Gnocerous surely you'll seeAnd that gnormous and gnorrible GnatWhose sting when it stings you goes in at the kneeAnd comes out through the top of your hat.'We may even get lost and be frozen by frost.We may die in an earthquake or tremor.Or nastier still, we may even be tossedOn the horns of a furious Dilemma.'But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill!Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge!Let's go rolling and bowling and spinning untilWe're away from old Spiker and Sponge!

~ Roald Dahl

To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path

~ Tahir Shah

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

~ Carol Rifka Brunt

May you see the world with wonder. And may you imagine only good things.

~ Charlene Costanzo

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.He was. He was going to shake hands with death.He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.(3 Kills For 1)

~ Cornell Woolrich

The eighth gift is Imagination. May it nourish your visions and dreams.

~ Charlene Costanzo

He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.

~ Sherwood Anderson

Your mind is your greatest power. Use it well.

~ Aneta Cruz

Even our recreation was scheduled. There was no time to look for birds or wander into the nearby woods. We were put into teams and sent into violent pursuit of a helpless ball.

~ Gloria Whelan

I could write paper people and I would love them too, I could make them almost real.

~ Ally Condie

The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

~ Annie Dillard

An idea weighs nothing, except on the mind.

~ A.t. Baron

If I do not personify God, you call me an atheist. But I do not personify God because I refuse to limit God to the boundaries of my imagination... or yours.

~ Steve Maraboli

I seek to be moved, my imagination reborn.Let me feast on poems that feed my hunger.

~ Susie Clevenger

To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The book can never be more than an interruption. Afterward, the listening begins again, to generate, in turn, other and completely different books.

~ Geoffrey O'brien

show me your eyes and i should tell who you are and what would your future

~ Mohamed Khadra

He wanted Jordan so badly, his fantasies consumed him. Whenever he reached out to touch something, paper, the phone, his steering wheel, there was a brief moment when he expected his hand to come in contact with the smooth silk of Jordan’s skin. When he ate, his tongue instinctively sought the taste of Jordan. Whenever he picked up the phone, he expected to hear Jordan’s voice.

~ Matthew Haldeman-Time

My life exists in an imagined reality.

~ Mandy Patinkin

The imagination is precious. Don't lose it. Don't lose the child in you.

~ Marilyn Manson

Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?Sounds like a Japanese game show.Kat straightens her shoulders. Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer.Okay: World government... no cancer... hover-boards.Go further. What's the good future after that?Spaceships. Party on Mars.Further.Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.Further.I pause a moment, then realize: I can't.Kat shakes her head. It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.

~ Robin Sloan

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

~ Anthony Powell

For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real. Becuase all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination. And listen.

~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

~ Peter S. Beagle

Harness the imagination: Sometimes curbing her, sometimes giving her rein, for she is the whole of happiness. She sets to rights even the understanding. She sinks to tyranny, not satisfied with mere faith, but demanding works. Thus she becomes the mistress of life itself. She does so with pleasure or with pain, according to the nonsense presented. She makes people contented or discontented with themselves. By dangling before some nothing but the specter of their eternal suffering, she becomes the scourge of these fools. To others she shows nothing but fortune and romance, while merrily laughing. Of all this she is capable if not held in check by the wisest of wills.

~ Baltasar Gracián

Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands–they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.

~ Maria Augusta Von Trapp

I refuse to settle for what you call reality.

~ Solange Nicole

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

~ Napoleon Hill

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.(Mind Over Murder)

~ Cornell Woolrich

For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

I am usually more impressed with people who are artful in shuffling a deck, than those who can masterfully play chess.

~ Lionel Suggs