Quotes About Imagination And Art

#1. What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Rollo May

#2. Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

William C. Bryant

#3. Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

#4. To live in high spirits but not recklessly, to be lighthearted without swaggering or rampaging, to show trust and truthfulness but not unconditionally and not naively, and to face uncertainty with imagination instead of fatalism - this is the art of living.

David A. Nyberg

#5. There's two types of people on this great Earth, the Doers and the Dreamers and they share one thing in common: Dreams. The dreamers demonstrates the ability to have an imagination.
The doers follows through their ability to fulfill their destiny through patience and perseverance.

Jes Fuhrmann

#6. The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.

Mortimer J. Adler

#7. It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

Luther E. Vann

#8. The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Susan Vreeland

#9. Art is a thing so much of the imagination, of the soul, that it is difficult to descend to the fundamentals of technique and yet make it plain to the student that these are but the 'means' and not an end in themselves.

John F. Carlson

#10. As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

Henry Ward Beecher

#11. He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed.

C.S. Richardson

#12. Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

John F. Kerry

#13. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

George Santayana

#14. A fierce and monkish art; a castigation of the flesh. You must cut out your imagination and not fly an airplane but regulate a half-dozen instruments ... At first, the conflicts between animal sense and engineering brain are irresistibly strong.

Wolfgang Langewiesche

#15. The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.

Bruce Springsteen

#16. The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

Joshua Reynolds

#17. The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.

Francisco Goya

#18. Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

George Henry Lewes

#19. However, an artist is limited only by his own skill and imagination. He's in total control of his art. Whereas nature is the artist here, and I merely try to interpret and manage her design.

Crit Kincaid

#20. Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance.

Thomas Moore

#21. Imagination is a flame that ignites the creative spirit. Imagination lights up your mind by stoking mental fires. It can be stimulated from the outside through the senses, or from the inside through the driving power of curiosity and discontent.

Wilferd Peterson

#22. Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

#23. There are no mistakes and it's never boring on the edge of imagination, which is only pure spirit having a bit of fun.

Wavy Gravy

#24. In fact, whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands ... it lies in his power to create them ...

Leonardo Da Vinci

#25. Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

Andre Gide

#26. I believe that teaching is a creative art in which evidence based knowledge is applied toward meeting the learning goals of learners. I believe that effective teaching is often the spark that ignites the imagination, possibility, and promise for learners, including the teacher.

Barbara Paterson

#27. I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.

Mary Szybist

#28. For me, the arts are just an endless source of intelligence, brilliance, imagination, and originality.

Gail Levin

#29. Imagination is tapping into the subconscious in a form of open play. That is why art or music therapy, which encourages a person to take up brushes and paint or an instrument, and just express themselves, is so powerful.

Phil 'Philosofree' Cheney

#30. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

Henry Moore

#31. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Oscar Wilde

#32. Israel is a wonderful place to be an artist - a place where imagination flourishes. Israeli culture is refreshingly avant garde - making films, music, performance art and visual art that continues to push the envelope, inspire and empower.

Ryan Kavanaugh

#33. A genius masters the art of observation, and unites with the source of imagination to create advancements in the cause for human evolution.

T.F. Hodge

#34. Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

Meir Shalev

#35. Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

Helen Garner

#36. The arts can open the door to the imagination, pushing the envelope of how peace can be created. It takes courage to take this kind of risk, and courage is what we all need to create a better world.

Wayne Shorter

#37. What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life?

Peter Greenaway

#38. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Vladimir Nabokov

#39. The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.

Keith Haring

#40. Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Keith Haring

#41. The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

Gertrude Atherton

#42. I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.

Sam Taylor-Wood

#43. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Virginia Woolf

#44. The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.

Gosta Mittag-Leffler

#45. Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would never have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual. In which case, thank God for the rain.

Joan D. Chittister

#46. If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Yann Martel

#47. The goal of 'Data Detectives' is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.

Rick Smolan

#48. I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

Brent Weeks

#49. Literature is like a subtle concoction of laboriously collected peripherals called words, intellect,thoughts,imagination,creativity and aestheticism brewed together to form a resplendent work of art.

Shilpa Sandesh

#50. Dance is simply the refinement of human movement - walking, running, and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.

Twyla Tharp

#51. Creativity, imagination and talent can only get you so far -- you still need luck and money -- And that's why they call it Show Business and not Show Art

Wayne J. Keeley

#52. Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination.

Nita Leland

#53. Humanity is as horrified and repulsed by real nature as it is by real death. Thus, we strike back against this formidable opponent with our sharpest weapon: our imagination. From this noble tool - born of necessity and elevated to beauty - culture was born, and the war against nature begun.

Anthony Marais

#54. Art is the child of imagination and gives life.

Mirka Mora

#55. The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.

Antonio Damasio

#56. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.

Debasish Mridha

#57. For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is - art.

Sigmund Freud

#58. Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. "I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens," says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist.

Ytasha L. Womack

#59. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.

Ove Arup

#60. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".

Joan Lindsay

#61. A composition - and every work of art is one - is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.

Jostein Gaarder

#62. I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

Keith Haring

#63. For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.

Pierre Soulages

#64. The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through the layers of demoded words and shapes.

William Carlos Williams

#65. Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

William Deresiewicz

#66. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.

Vivianne Crowley

#67. In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

Robert Aris Willmott

#68. An educational foundation is only part of the equation. In order for creativity to flourish and imagination to take hold, we also need to expose our children to the arts from a very young age.

Michelle Obama

#69. As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity-no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.

Edward Weston

#70. Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

#71. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#72. The highest and best work of imagination is the marvelous transformation that it works in character. Imagine that you are one with the principal of good, and you will become truly good.

Charles Fillmore

#73. The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

Paul Fussell

#74. My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life ... I had to live in my head ... art was a way of making myself feel better.

Philip Schultz

#75. Art requires imagination. It requires Creativity. Creativity requires experience and experience comes from your life. And your life is expressed in your art.

Bruce Lee

#76. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!

Paul Lockhart

#77. The necessity of loyalty between friends, the responsibility that the strong owe the infirm, the illusion of ill-gotten gain, the rewards of hard work, honesty, and trust-these are enduring truths glimpsed and judged first through the imagination, first through art.

Michael Dorris

#78. The interaction between author and reader is the most intimate in the world of art. The reader's imagination shares and completes the writer's.

Mark Rubinstein

#79. Sex, creativity, music, art, family, love, beauty, and creative imagination are all part of the spiritual path in the tantric traditions. So I think that for today that has a lot to say to us about not dividing ourselves from ourselves.

Surya Das

#80. Anything that one imagines of God apart from Christ is only useless thinking and vain idolatry.

Martin Luther

#81. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

Danielle M. Maistry

#82. Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.

Mordicai Gerstein

#83. Art is an imagination, projection, and reflection of the mind in a particular form that society can internalize and enjoy.

Debasish Mridha

#84. When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free. In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within

Pipilotti Rist

#85. A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Jacob Bronowski

#86. 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

#87. In other words, man's imagination, when it is not corrupt, yearns for the holy - to behold its beauty from a distance, to be possessed by it. All the greatest art of the past, pagan and Christian, testifies to this desire. It

Anthony Esolen

#88. Art is the colors and textures of your imagination.

Meghan Trainor

#89. Not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romaticism, but throught the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts, and revaluate the giver.

Alain LeRoy Locke

#90. You cannot do silhouettes in fantasy. Ah, no, you must be faithful. It is, the art, a, what you call, paradox. It is always that you must be simple, and then, if you are simple, you will stimulate the imagination of the observer.

Ugo Mochi

#91. Humans consist of body, mind and imagination. Our bodies are faulty, our minds untrustworthy, but our imagination has made us remarkable.

John Masefield

#92. Imagination stimulates your thinking power by giving your mind abundant data with which to work. It opens the gate to dreams and fantasies so that you may become receptive, as a little child, in exploring the Kingdom of Ideas.

Wilferd Peterson

#93. 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

#94. Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#95. From music and dance to painting and sculpting, the arts allow us to explore new worlds and to view life from another perspective. They also encourage individuals to sharpen their skills and to nurture their imagination and intellect.

George W. Bush

#96. Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

Marcel Proust

#97. 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

#98. Perhaps we might, within the anatomy of our imaginations, think once more of the naked body as a vessel of grace, taste and wonder. In the spotted history of art, stranger things have happened.

Robert Genn

#99. The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

Immanuel Kant

#100. QUOTE:
"Creating art and literature requires a creative imagination as well as the ability to get things done in a disciplined manner. Live in the moment, and plan for tomorrow.

Adam Donaldson Powell