Imagination Quotes

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.
– LeVar Burton
Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.
– Claude Bernard
President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions.
– Dennis Hastert
Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.
– George Henry Lewes
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
– Tom Robbins
People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.
– Curtis Sittenfeld
People know that they're going to see something which is entertaining but challenging as well because of the form it's in. It's dance theatre and it requires you to use your imagination - it's not straight forward.
– Matthew Bourne
People can't just listen to the music and have their own imagination and take them where they wanna go.
– Ann Wilson
Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.
– Philip Guston
Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside, these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels.
– Julianna Baggott
Our imagination just needs space. It's all it needs, that moment where you just sort of stare into the distance where your brain gets to sort of somehow rise up.
– Glen Hansard
Only in your imagination can you revise.
– Fay Wray
One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.
– Stella Adler
One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.
– Ella Maillart
One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.
– Alan Rickman
On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.
– Bobby Seale
On 'Into The Wild' I spent months risking my life and on 'Speed Racer' I spent 60 days acting in front of a green screen. No danger to my physical self, but I sure had to use my imagination.
– Emile Hirsch
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
– Robert Doisneau
Now, I'm a failed political consultant. But sometimes fiction has a way of capturing people's imagination in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Conservatives typically haven't written much fiction - specifically political thrillers - over the years to educate, inspire and mobilize people on issues of great import, but we ought to.
– Joel C. Rosenberg
Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.
– Tycho Brahe
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.
– John le Carre
No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.
– Anne Sullivan Macy
No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.
– Peter Jackson
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
– Edward Hopper
Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
– Marquis de Sade
Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.
– Evelyn Underhill
My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.
– Michael Tippett
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
– Tom Waits
My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead.
– Nicole Kidman
My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
– Andre Dubus III
My life has been a gift up to this point, and I've been blessed beyond my wildest imagination. And wherever this ride takes me is where I'm going.
– Sean Hannity
My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.
– Patricia Highsmith
My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
– Elizabeth Wurtzel
My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.
– Jessica Hagedorn
My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
– Barbara Corcoran
My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.
– Andrew Bird
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
– Richard Russo
My best investment is my imagination, because it has never failed to bring me my greatest returns!
– Randy Castillo
Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.
– Stephen Sondheim
Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
– Agnes Smedley
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?
– Ernst Toller
Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
– Blaise Pascal
Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
– Carl Clinton Van Doren
Many Nobel Prizes are awaiting good research to understand and explain the many mysteries of our bodies, such as the basic mechanism of memory or imagination.
– John Cameron
Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.
– Joshua Foer
Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I've learned in my own life.
– Ronnie James Dio
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
– H. L. Mencken
Love is based on imagination.
– Olivier Martinez
Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.
– Joyce Cary
Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.
– Bill Hicks
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
– Marcel Proust
Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly.
– Phylicia Rashad
Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.
– Georg Brandes
Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind.
– Joseph Franklin Rutherford
It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.
– Robin Wright Penn
It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
– Alexander McCall Smith
It's just a way of trying to get to a third thing that's not particular to any quote-unquote genre. It's been great for me it's really opened me up and gotten me to use that part of my imagination. It's very scary in a lot of ways, and just as exciting.
– Charlie Hunter
It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek,' that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.
– LeVar Burton
It's a wonderful thing working with young actors. I know a lot of people don't like working with children. I actually adore it, because you watch their imagination open up and you watch them start to learn this job that I've been doing for so long. They come with such a lack of cynicism.
– Michelle Forbes
It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.
– Jack Nicholson
It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.
– Julian Schnabel
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
– Martha Gellhorn
It will take some time before a politician will capture the imagination of the American people and have the vision and understanding to do what is necessary for a better future for the people of America and the world.
– David Korten
It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.
– Kevin J. Anderson
It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.
– Elizabeth Wurtzel
It takes no imagination to live within your means.
– Francis Ford Coppola
It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today.
– Michael Apted
It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.
– Leonard Orr
It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination.
– Robert South
It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.
– Edouard Manet
It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
– Paul Farmer
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
– Edgar Degas
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
– Victor Hugo
In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.
– Phil Harris
In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true.
– Joe Shuster
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
– Wallace Stevens
In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.
– Colleen McCullough
In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination - very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted.
– Joe Shuster
In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.
– J. C. Watts
In my imagination yes, I remember, when I was six years old, I was conducting all this concert in my house. But now it's real.
– Gustavo Dudamel
In many cases your imagination is much more effective than what can be shown. It primes you to know something is about to happen - the anticipation and anxiety is worse than what ends up happening.
– Oren Peli
In imagination, there's no limitation.
– Mark Victor Hansen
Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
– Rod Serling
Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
– Robinson Jeffers
Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage.
– Ellen Terry
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
– Amy Waldman
Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.
– Mary Wesley
Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.
– Christopher Fry
Imagination needs to be fed.
– Barbara Januszkiewicz
Imagination is the true magic carpet.
– Norman Vincent Peale
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
– William Blake
Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.
– Lauren Bacall
Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.
– Ida Tarbell
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
– Joseph Joubert
Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.
– George Henry Lewes
Imagination is the air of mind.
– Philip James Bailey
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
– J. K. Rowling
Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.
– Gilbert Parker