Imagination Quotes

The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
– Mary Catherine Bateson
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
– Daniel Bell
Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.
– Ingrid Bengis
Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.
– Edgar Rice Burroghs
[Imagination] helps me to become part of that journey that I'm going through in font of the camera, or in front of an audience. I used to think you had to disappear within a character, but I find that puts a mask on what I do.
– Kim Cattrall
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
– Jeremy Collier
The great successful men of the world have used their imagination... they think ahead and create their mental picture in all it details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building-steadily building.
– Robert Collier
Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
– Joseph Conrad
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
– Joseph Conrad
Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.
– Stephen Covey
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
– e. e. cummings
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
– Alexander Cockburn
Imagination, industry, and intelligence - the three I s - are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.
– Kitty O'Neill Collins
Facts have long since upstaged fiction, and the novelistic imagination now contents itself with documenting incidents it wouldn't have the temerity to invent.
– Peter Conrad
When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.
– Emile Coue
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
– Edward Dahlberg
If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.
– Mary Daly
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
– John Dewey
The possible's slow fuse is lit, by the Imagination.
– Emily Dickinson
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
– Annie Dillard
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
– Albert Einstein
The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
– Albert Einstein
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
– Albert Einstein
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
– George Eliot
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans -which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
– George Eliot
I think my writing was innate. Being so painfully shy and introverted as a child, as well as an extreme thinker with a hyperactive imagination, it seems befitting. It became such a powerful passion early on in life.
– Kim Elizabeth
The fear and anxiety of baring my soul is transcended by the thrill and honor and wonderfulness of being able to touch and affect so many people... having people look into my mind, my imagination... into my heart and soul.
– Kim Elizabeth
It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
– Henry Ellis
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Left to my own imagination, I could never have composed a scenario that was anywhere as interesting as my life has been: starting out as an eager altar boy, a good Boy Scout, a relatively docile Dominican brother and priest, receiving an advanced degree in spirituality, teaching bishops and many others around the world about our Western spiritual tradition, and then ending up being expelled from the Dominican order.
– Matthew Fox
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge That myth is more potent than history That dreams are more powerful than facts That hope always triumphs over experience That laughter is the only cure for grief And I believe that love is stronger than death.
– Robert Fulghum
I did three and a half years in the architecture school with no real love or feel for it. After quite a while I realized I don't like to pick up a pen and freely sketch and let my imagination run towards structures. And if I don't have that natural desire, what am I doing here? How did I let this illusion go on so long?
– Art Garfunkel
We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
– Judy Garland
Why? Because I believe I will. If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you've got imagination, you don't need stuff thrown out for you in a blueprint, you don't face facts-what can stop you?
– Ruth Gordon
The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that.
– Andrew Greeley
A clear night sky and a little instruction allows anyone to soar in mind and imagination to the farthest reaches of an enormous universe in which we are but a speck. And there is nothing more exhilarating and humbling than that.
– Brian Greene
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
– Jules de Gaultier
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
– Jules de Gautier
Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.
– Ralph Gerard
You have a perfect right to use your imagination as you will in developing the principles, but the fundamental scientific theory must be correct.
– Hugo Gernsback
I'm not the person your mother warned you about... her imagination isn't that good.
– Amy Gorin
I'm used to playing literal story lines and dealing with people's emotions. I had a story where I was put in a dungeon for four weeks. That to me is such an unlikely scenario, I had a very hard time making my imagination go there. I find myself not actually playing it. I will show up for it.
– Deidre Hall
Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
– Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon, implying in the rightist imagination that she relished the thought of killing those American pilots innocently flying overhead.
– Tom Hayden
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
– Ernest Hemingway
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
– Jimi Hendrix
A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.
– Brad Henry
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
– Napoleon Hill
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
– Eric Hoffer
That mountains that are now raised up in the imagination of many would become plain, and every difficulty surmounted.
– Samuel Hopkins
The protein of our cultural imagination.
– Robert Hughes
Good metrical rhymed verse, if it's to grip the imagination and stay readable, has to have, as well as those external formal features, the same dynamo of hidden musical dramatic laws as the apparently free verse.
– Ted Hughes
Let us always remember that our homeland needs people who would tackle its problems and concerns in a rational and realistic fashion as well as in a creative and balanced way, and not those who would take it to the level of dreams and unrealistic imagination in a world of illusions and sloganism.
– King Hussein
The worst advice a young writer can get is Write what you know. Imagination is more important than experience.
– Joe Haldeman
I'm not into that whole Satanic thing. It's just something to fall back on if you don't have much imagination. Singing your fiftieth song about having lunch with Satan - I'm not into it. It's silly.
– Kirk Hammett
The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination... you can make feast of straw.
– Jane Stanton Hitchcock
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
– John Keats
I use my intuition, my imagination, my voice and my body. That is really what actors do. There is a lot of nonsense talked about acting, but really all we do is use our voice, our body, our imaginations to create portraits about people so that you and the audience can be pulled into beautiful stories.
– Ben Kingsley
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
– Karl Kraus
In an era when the nation's collective imagination is no longer captured by space, real science sometimes has a smaller budget than science fiction.
– Peter Kendall
But the average person doesn't have that much imagination. They just want to be entertained. They want to have the tableau presented for them. They don't want to participate beyond a certain point. They want the safety of the herd, to be catered to, sit back and enjoy.
– Anton LaVey
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great -quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
– C. S. Lewis
One of the virtues of the very young is that you don't let facts get in the way of your imagination.
– Sam Levinson
Imagination without study is the self-indulgence of the intellect.
– David Lindsay
Imagination is a very precise thing, you know-it is not fantasy; the man who invented the wheel while he was observing another man walking-that is imagination!
– Jacques Lipchitz
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
– Jacques Maritain
Being an actor's about imagination and you have to keep extending your imagination.
– Dominic Monaghan
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
– Iris Murdoch
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
– Iris Murdoch
It is beyond the imagination of the menu-maker that there are people in the world who breakfast on a single egg.
– Melvin Maddocks
The brawny mix of extraordinary sights-weather, politics, races, imagination, corruption and athletics. They clash and mingle here where the broad prairies that are the world's most fertile collection of farm fields meet the vast Great Lakes that are the world's largest collection of fresh water.
– Andrew H. Malcolm
Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.
– George Leigh Mallory
Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
– Ian Mcewan
Imagination must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier.
– Patricia McKillip
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.
– Ben Okri
Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.
– Camille Paglia
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
– Sylvia Plath
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
– Plato
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
– Edgar Allan Poe
It's pretty intriguing what you learn. Twelve minutes of three-dimensional footage cost so much money. Like, $60 million. Your imagination runs wild. You have all these possibilities. You can do anything with film and make anything come to life.
– Michelle Rodriguez
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
– Helen Rowland
Nor are the terrorists by any stretch of the imagination the repressed or the disadvantaged. They chose violence despite consistent exhortations to contribute to the new Iraq.
– Jalal Talabani
Imagination, industry, and intelligence - the three I's - Mare all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.
– Ellen Terry
Imagining playing the guitar is a slightly looser thing than playing it. You can hear more things sometimes. The fingers of your imagination aren't quite as hidebound as your real fingers.
– Richard Thompson
To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.
– Thomas Traherne
The imagination must not be given too much material. It must be denied food so that it can work for itself.
– Macedonlo de la Torre
I've turned down a lot of stuff. I've read several scripts and said That's not me, I'm not interested in doing that. It's got to be something that inspires me and captures my imagination. I want to be able to say There's a challenge.
– Karl Urban
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
– Voltaire
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
– Simone Weil
You know grief. You've had it in your own life. But I don't use it directly. It's processed through my acting instincts, the bit of me that knows about those things, so when it comes out it's not my grief that you're seeing, it's the grief of that character. It's active imagination.
– Tom Wilkinson
Planning is thinking beforehand how something is to be made or done, and mixing imagination with the product - which in a broad sense makes all of us planners. The only difference is that some people get a license to get paid for thinking and the rest of us just contribute our good thoughts to our fellow man.
– Paul Williams
Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.
– George Weiss
Commitment unlocks the doors of imagination, allows vision, and gives us the right stuff to turn our dreams into reality.
– James Womack
We are told never to cross a bridge until we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have 'crossed bridges' in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.
– Anonymous
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
– Anonymous