Top 100 Human Imagination Quotes
#1. The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.
Terence McKenna
#2. The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
Edmund Wilson
#3. After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
Sigmund Freud
#4. Tides is a rich, taut, suspenseful, and funny exploration of two worlds, selkie and human. It's full of mystery but it's also so fully imagined that a reader can jump right in. Betsy Cornwell is a terrific new talent with a boundless imagination.
Valerie Sayers
#5. The immense distance between God and humanity is the indispensable backdrop to a Christian idea of revelation. To reduce God to the level of human thought and human imagination, so that we can comprehend God, is to lose a sense of the very thing that distinguishes God as God.
A.J. Conyers
#6. The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
Richard Powers
#7. It did matter to get out of bed. There were webs to weave. Strings to grasp. Packages to deliver. Conversations to start. Thoughts to be expressed. Sams to slam into. Oceans to swim. And sad little men hiding in electrical sockets, waiting to be born of the human imagination.
Bud Macfarlane Jr.
#8. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#9. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
#10. Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Margaret Atwood
#11. Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity.
Norman Cousins
#12. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.
Carl Sagan
#13. Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination, - imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#14. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
Saul Bellow
#15. 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
#16. Our capacity as human beings for imagination and storytelling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power.
David Smail
#17. Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility - these three forces are the very nerve of education.
Rudolf Steiner
#18. Often, the monsters we create in our imagination are not nearly as frightening as the monstrous acts perpetrated by ordinary human beings in the aim of one cause or another.
Libba Bray
#19. Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.
Daniel Bell
#20. Fantasyland was designed as a home for some of the classic characters [from those films], and as a symbol of the magic, hope and beauty of the human imagination.
Leslie Le Mon
#21. The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
Gertrude Atherton
#22. When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the "suspension of disbelief" and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
John Granger
#23. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People
Yuval Noah Harari
#24. The Human brain is a hotbed of imagination, capable of taking a simple stimulus and magnifying it many times greater than it is ... let your mind run wild!
Red Phoenix
#25. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.
Karl R. Popper
#26. Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Abraham Verghese
#27. Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.
Dean Koontz
#28. What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.
R.M. Engelhardt
#30. To shut your mind, heart, imagination to the sufferings of others is to begin slowly but inexorably to die. It is to cease by inches from being human, to become in the end capable of nothing, generous or unselfish; or sometimes capable of anything, however terrible.
John Austin Baker
#31. Love is purely a creation of the human imagination ... the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
Katherine Anne Porter
#32. The human condition is such that we can only stomach so much imagination. We need for things to be labeled either fiction or nonfiction. There is no section in between.
J.W. Lord
#33. It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.
Terence McKenna
#34. The abilities distinctive of human beings are abilities of intellect and will. The relevant abilities of intellect are thought, imagination (the cogitative and creative imagination rather than the image-generating faculty), personal (experiential) and factual memory, reasoning and selfconsciousness.
P.M.S. Hacker
#35. The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.
Michael Foley
#36. Touch the sky of human imagination. Read fantasy.
A.E. Marling
#37. Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
Tim O'Brien
#38. The simple truth is that interstellar distance will not fit the human imagination.
Douglas Adams
#39. My imagination is my temple where I meditate and pray to change human consciousness and awareness so that I may find peace.
Debasish Mridha
#40. Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.
Chad Harbach
#41. Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued.
Helen Fisher
#42. Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.
Katherine Paterson
#43. Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.
William Poundstone
#44. It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.
G.K. Chesterton
#45. The analytical nature of science gives us the ability to perceive the anatomy of the universe and every molecule in it, but it is the human imagination that gives it life.
Louisa Preston
#46. Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.
Erma Bombeck
#47. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#48. Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.
Maria Montessori
#49. God loves the church with a love too deep for human imagination: He loves her with all His infinite heart. Therefore let her sons be of good courage; she cannot be far from prosperity.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#50. It's been by turns frustrating and fascinating and wonderful beyond imagination. If what I suspect is true, it's one of the most important milestones in human history to acknowledge that we are not alone in the universe.
Steven M. Greer
#51. The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.
Jacques D'Amboise
#52. In the twenty-first century, human minds, and to a lesser extent, human hearts can work like well calibrated precision instruments, but who can write the universal manual on imagination?
Martin Guevara Urbina
#53. If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people.
Connie Nielsen
#54. I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary.
Alan Moore
#55. A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion.
Debasish Mridha
#56. It's about human imagination and curiosity. What's out there? What's in the great beyond? What exists at levels we can't see with our five senses?
James Cameron
#57. The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but that it happened at all.
Jack Goody
#58. No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
Lajos Egri
#59. Imagination may be the most essential, uniquely human capacity - creating both the dead-end crises of our time and the doorway through them.
Bill Plotkin
#60. The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
William Blake
#61. Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.
Alison Gopnik
#62. Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.
Al Alvarez
#63. Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
#64. All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.
Jay S. Walker
#66. There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.
Yuval Noah Harari
#67. Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.
Ha-Joon Chang
#68. It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.
John B. S. Haldane
#69. Love is ... not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#70. The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!
E.T.A. Hoffmann
#71. In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.
Chuck Palahniuk
#72. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.
Christian Wiman
#73. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
#74. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.
Terence McKenna
#75. Theatre is a voyage into the archives of the human imagination
Natasha Tsakos
#76. Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.
John Ruskin
#77. No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
Northrop Frye
#78. The ego is the product of imagination. It is how a human being sees himself or herself. It makes humans demand special status in nature and culture. Nature does not care for this self-image of human beings. Culture, which is a man-made creation, attempts to accommodate it.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#79. We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.
Satish Kumar
#80. We humans are imperfect, but what makes us human is not are kind but our courage to overcome fear, our ability to turn imagination into reality, our hope to diminish despair, and have a smile on our face although we in a predicament.
Paranjay Malkan
#81. I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God's grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.
Marilynne Robinson
#82. Imagination that compares and contrasts with what is around as well as what is better and worse is the living power and prime agent of all human perception judgement and emotional reaction.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#83. Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
Ken Robinson
#84. The Master and Margarita is my favorite. To me it's the greatest exploration of the human imagination.
Daniel Radcliffe
#85. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
Rollo May
#86. I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.
Kathryn Lasky
#87. Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#88. That is why the human race is dying - too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.
Jeff VanderMeer
#89. 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
#90. Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky ...
John Noble Wilford
#91. The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.
Michael Leunig
#92. It is generally my thesis then to insist on the importance of imagination in sex, to insist that the practice of sex, as performed among human beings, be accorded the same deliberate and playful application of fancy, imagination and intelligence as any other significant human activity.
John Norman
#93. Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
J.M. Coetzee
#94. It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
Peter Ackroyd
#95. A man's alibi is the child of his own imagination. It is human nature to defend one's own brain-child.
Napoleon Hill
#96. He dreamed, as human beings always dream - random firings of memory and imagination that the unconscious mind tries to put together into coherent stories. Bean rarely paid attention to his own dreams, rarely even remembered that he dreamed at all. But
Orson Scott Card
#97. There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
Ronald Reagan
#98. Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#99. Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humility ... A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL.
Kenneth Patchen
#100. Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.
Ken Robinson
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