Top 100 Sayings About The Imagination
#1. Night favors belief, and the imagination peoples the air with specters.
Jose Rizal
#2. When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm ... the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.
Jonas Salk
#3. I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination.
Martha Graham
#4. Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
Denise Levertov
#5. Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
Ian McEwan
#6. 'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.
Kate Winslet
#7. It's usually easier to rouse stupidity to action than to arouse wisdom to effort, for wisdom sees alternatives while stupidity lacks the imagination to do this. All sinister interests in a country can depend ultimately upon the strength of stupidity.
Chapman Cohen
#8. But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination.
Jesse Ball
#9. The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller
#10. Pickup is a linear process: Capture the imagination first
and the heart next. Interest plus attraction plus seduction equals sex.
Neil Strauss
#11. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
Mark Rothko
#12. We need to understand that every time an elementary teacher captures the imagination of a child through the arts or music of language this nation gets a little stronger.
Richard Riley
#14. If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich
#15. Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.
Walter Lippmann
#16. Once you realize that the imagination is non-fiction, the world is yours
Carl Henegan
#17. For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
Manuel Puig
#18. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#19. The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.
David Berlinski
#20. I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new
by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
Ralph Ellison
#21. Maybe they traveled into darkness eternal without protest because they lacked the imagination to envision anything else.
Dean Koontz
#23. The opportunities in this world are as great as we have the imagination to see them ... but we never get that view from the bottom of the nest.
Charles Kettering
#24. Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone De Beauvoir
#25. 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
#26. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.
Joan Didion
#27. The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
#28. Darkness does something to a place, doesn't it? It distorts. It becomes a canvas for the imagination. The good news is that shadows are only the deflection of light. They can frighten, but they can do no harm.
David Jeremiah
#29. Before you judge me too harshly, consider your own deepest fears - real or imagined. Actually, all fear is born of the imagination, which means that the danger we fear doesn't need to be rational or even real to be potent.
Richard Paul Evans
#30. Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.
Tahir Shah
#31. Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision.
Eloisa James
#32. 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
#33. By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#34. The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.
Robert Charles Wilson
#35. As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.
Mervyn Peake
#36. There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.
William Blackstone
#37. When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
Dodie Smith
#38. The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.
David Brooks
#39. What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
Doris Lessing
#40. Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
Helen Rowland
#41. The great task demanded of man is reproduction. He is urged by passion to perform this task. Passion, working through the imagination, produces love. Passion is the impelling factor, imagination the disturbing factor; and the disturbance of passion by imagination produces love.
Jack London
#42. There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Jean Giraudoux
#43. The imagination is the voyage of our thoughts in the endless ocean of the mind that searches for the splendid beaches of happiness.
Debasish Mridha
#44. The victories of the imagination involved no risks, and a confrontation with an enemy always ended satisfactorily when both sides of the conversation came from one's own daydreams.
David Eddings
#45. He had married this creature, this figment of the imagination of a million masturbatory men, semen-fingered and self-satisfied.
Gillian Flynn
#46. 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
#47. Word porn is the best porn when the imagination is well endowed.
Dez Marie
#48. Napoleon Hill said The Imagination is the most powerful most miraculous inconceivably powerful force that the world's ever known
Bob Proctor
#49. 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
#50. Not the life of the party, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Belle Aurora
#51. 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
#52. To find the nectar of life, let me get lost in the mysteries and beauties of the imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#53. [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
#54. The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.
Stella Adler
#55. How can you take such a risk? This could mean anything! It could mean nothing at all! Haven't you heard of fiction? This might be just from the imagination of a poet!
Jason Ellis
#56. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#57. When the universe is ephemeral, one can easily feel that human existence is meaningless. Why should I do anything at all?
On the other hand it is tempting to try and make the best of it. I'm here, anyway. The imagination won't cope if I try to picture where I'd otherwise be.
Erlend Loe
#58. The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.
William Irwin Thompson
#60. What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
John Ruskin
#61. In all forms of magick, the imagination or image-making faculty is the most important factor
Kenneth Grant
#62. God was created by evolution, inside the imagination of a primate.
Steve Fowler
#63. They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#64. Busted is not the ideal band I'd like to be in by any stretch of the imagination.
Charlie Simpson
#65. The very remoteness kindles the imagination of the adventurous hunter. From the top of any mountain the challenge extends far and wide, until the mountains meet the sky.
Fred Bear
#66. The whole art of merchandising," he said, "consists of appealing to the imagination.
Lindy Woodhead
#67. There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
William Carlos Williams
#68. All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree.
Gail Caldwell
#69. 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
#70. I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
#71. Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
James Joyce
#72. What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.
David Eugene Smith
#74. 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
#75. I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.
James Broughton
#76. A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.
Richard Eyre
#77. Crossing too many t's and dotting too many i's makes a room look overdone and tiresome. One should create something that fires the imagination without overemphasis.
Nancy Lancaster
#78. Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.
Sara Sheridan
#79. 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
#80. Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.
Bill Hicks
#81. Cadiz is a city of magic, like Cracow or Dublin, to set the mind on fire at a turn of a corner ... The eye is continually fed, the imagination stirred, by a train of spectacles as charming as if they had been contrived.
Honor Tracy
#82. [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
#83. Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas Nagel
#84. I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.
Oscar Niemeyer
#85. I don't think I've reached perfection by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe someday I'll become a perfectionist.
Douglas Booth
#86. Your hands are tied in action, but your hands are not tied in imagination and everything springs forth from the imagination. Everything.
Esther Hicks
#87. The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.
Robert Wyland
#88. Worry is not true thought. Worry is a misuse of the imagination.
Steve Chandler
#89. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
John Keats
#90. If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.
Bela Lugosi
#91. It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it.
Pat Conroy
#92. The thought of how far the human race would have advanced without government simply staggers the imagination.
Doug Casey
#93. The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
Napoleon Hill
#94. 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
#95. The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.
Neil Gaiman
#96. As the clutter of outrageous, fantastical photographs that today occupy Sandy Island's place on Google Earth suggests, Sandy Island's disappearance established it as a rebel base for the imagination, an innocent and an upstart that managed to escape the vast technologies of omni-knowledge.
Anonymous
#97. 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
#98. [Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson
#99. The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.
S.A. Tawks
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
