Of The Imagination Quotes

#1. Mickey represented an honest product, a pure spirit and a cheerful heart, a sort of staggeringly simple pleasure in the exercise of the imagination.

Eve Zibart

#2. Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm.

Leland Ryken

#3. I am increasingly convinced that humankind's best future lies within the power of the imagination, with knowledge following closely in step.

Duane Hewitt

#4. The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

Salman Rushdie

#5. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

Ernest Hemingway,

#6. Discovery peaked 30 years ago. It takes no feat of the imagination. It takes no feat of intellect to conclude we now face the corresponding peak in production in 2005.

Gordon Campbell

#7. Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#8. Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

Susan Sontag

#9. We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

James Joyce

#10. A city with no way of telling the time can by no stretch of the imagination be called civilised. It's just a mob with walls.

K.J. Parker

#11. Literalists of the imagination

Mary Ann Moore

#12. 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

#13. I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

Norman Douglas

#14. Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife's household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate - a failure of the imagination.

Gloria Steinem

#15. Let us be reckless in our capture of the imagination. For when we do, our dreams become the foundation upon which our reality is built.

Damon Lee

#16. The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Bertrand Russell

#17. No matter what our age, we ought to never stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination.

Robin R. Meyers

#18. A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.

Edgar Degas

#19. I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. - JOHN KEATS

Jandy Nelson

#20. Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume

#21. Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances.

Sam Worthington

#22. Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Thomas C. Foster

#23. After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Wallace Stevens

#24. The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.

William Hazlitt

#25. There's something magical about a home run. It almost violates the space of the stadium. It's a game of the imagination in some ways. Baseball.

Alex Gibney

#26. Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of the imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

Madeleine L'Engle

#27. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

Azar Nafisi

#28. It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything.

William Morris

#29. Transformation of the intangible impulse, of desire, into the tangible reality, of money, calls for the use of a plan, or plans. These plans must be formed with the aid of the imagination, and mainly, with the synthetic faculty. Read

Napoleon Hill

#30. Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination.

Patrick Kavanagh

#31. To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.

George MacDonald

#32. From the writer's perspective, audience is always an act of the imagination.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#33. Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology ...

Susan Sontag

#34. All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.

George MacDonald

#35. Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Northrop Frye

#36. ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination ...

Ambrose Bierce

#37. their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.

Philip Zaleski

#38. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Walter Isaacson

#39. 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

#40. Not the life of the party, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Belle Aurora

#41. To find the nectar of life, let me get lost in the mysteries and beauties of the imagination.

Debasish Mridha

#42. [T]he judicious reader ought to know what the chief character in any work of the imagination will naturally perform, according to the situation he is thrown into, as well as doth the author himself.

Sarah Fielding

#43. Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Alphonse De Lamartine

#44. Busted is not the ideal band I'd like to be in by any stretch of the imagination.

Charlie Simpson

#45. It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

Wallace Stevens

#46. I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

Terence McKenna

#47. I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it's science fiction, horror or really anything. I'm just drawn to quality. I don't think 'Darkness Falls' is horror; there isn't any gore by any stretch of the imagination.

Emma Caulfield

#48. [The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Rebecca West

#49. I don't think I've reached perfection by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe someday I'll become a perfectionist.

Douglas Booth

#50. Worry is not true thought. Worry is a misuse of the imagination.

Steve Chandler

#51. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.

John Keats

#52. This book is an invention, an act of the imagination, and in no way should be mistaken for reality, the place where much good invention originates.

Carole Maso

#53. I grew up in Honolulu. It's not the ballet cultural mecca by any stretch of the imagination. People are much more familiar with hula than they are with ballet.

Joan Chen

#54. IMPRESSIONS
Time brought a thousand impressions.
Not one of them had I seen in the mirror of the imagination.
(Anwar-i-Suhaili)

Idries Shah

#55. For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#56. A powerful flight of the imagination ... an entirely enjoyable reading experience, wrought by a pair of writers noted for excellence.

Roger Zelazny

#57. The answers lie in not just hard science or philosophical rhetoric but in experiments of the imagination as well. Human perspective must be re-examined through an almost whimsical fount of imagination of species, magic, and clear creative thinking.

Leviak B. Kelly

#58. Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men
he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

Graham Greene

#59. To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

Clifton Fadiman

#60. Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

Peter Ackroyd

#61. The task of writing a novel is to imagine a world
a world that first exists as a picture before it eventually takes the form of words. Only later do we express through words the picture we imagine, so that readers can share this product of the imagination.

Orhan Pamuk

#62. But You know Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to Man.

John Constable

#63. No fairy tale, this. This was by no stretch of the imagination a polished fantasy. This was a searing, living force, rough around the edges, unfamiliar and bittersweet.
And precious.

V.S. Carnes

#64. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

Zoe Heller

#65. It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another, always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance.

Emile Chartier

#66. This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.

Robert F. Kennedy

#67. Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

Christopher Koch

#68. I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker.

Lee Daniels

#69. For me, it's always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment.

Jason Silva

#70. When dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"
above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it.

Marianne Moore

#71. With multimedia, everything blurs. Software takes the concept of the imagination and makes it something you can edit, tweak, and transform with digital techniques. Everything becomes an edited file.

DJ Spooky

#72. There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#73. Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination ... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Karen Thompson Walker

#74. Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.

Diane Paulus

#75. Good writing - good stories - are the imagination's firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.

Stephen King

#76. Ray Bradbury is one who is contributing to the understanding of the imagination and the curiosity of the human race.

Buzz Aldrin

#77. The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Alexander Cockburn

#78. Respect the past, trust in the future and believe in the power of the imagination.-

Nancy B. Brewer

#79. I don't define myself as an actor at all. Nor is that my greatest passion in life by any stretch of the imagination.

Shenae Grimes

#80. Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

Austin O'Malley

#81. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.

Frances Hardinge

#82. Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

George Santayana

#83. I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.

David Salle

#84. I became an actress because I discovered the world of the imagination when I was about 14 or so and the concept that you could engage in this amazing world of storytelling. I saw a production of Hamlet, and I didn't know Hamlet died in the end.

Helen Mirren

#85. Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#86. I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn't stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination.

Hayao Miyazaki

#87. The imagination is the spur of delights ... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Marquis De Sade

#88. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?

Jean-Paul Sartre

#89. Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.

Alan Lightman

#90. Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

Federico Fellini

#91. So scary watching the news ... Like Iraq ... could ever under any stretch of the imagination be any threat to us whatsoever.

Bill Hicks

#92. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

Bruce Catton

#93. That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out dazed in the mellow spring evening and I think, now I would not mind dying.

Anais Nin

#94. History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.

Peter Geye

#95. I always thought Cheers ended well. You always anticipate that the characters, theough they're leaving television, will somehow go on in another world of the imagination, which I think is good.

Kelsey Grammer

#96. Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flush of truth.

Jules Michelet

#97. Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

Michael Ignatieff

#98. Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#99. He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irene Nemirovsky

#100. Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

Marquis De Sade