Top 100 The Imaginary Quotes
#1. Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.
Theodore Newton Vail
#2. Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.
Andre Breton
#4. Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven are divisions and distinctions we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe.
Fanny Kemble
#5. ... we have bad dreams
because our brain is trying to protect us ... If we can figure out a way to beat the imaginary monsters ... Then the real monsters don't seem so scary ... That's why we like reading scary stories.
Dan Poblocki
#6. Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.
Nicole Brossard
#7. NEVERLAND:The imaginary island home of Peter Pan and the lost boys. A place where you never grow up. Michael Jackson's former retreat. An accurate description of the 21st century.
Daniel Prokop
#8. But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people ...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#9. Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing.
Stanley Spencer
#10. History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia.
Herodotus
#11. I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.
Dana Spiotta
#12. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.
Jean Baudrillard
#13. The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench and optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.
Colette
#14. The imaginary is that which tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#15. He felt the imaginary weight of shackles press against his soul. He bound himself to her once more.
Abbie Chandler
#16. I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.
Dilshad Vadsaria
#17. Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.
Peter Jackson
#18. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans ... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
Norman Mailer
#19. I dreamed of my other family, the imaginary one with boring parents,
Peter Swanson
#20. And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
Virginia Woolf
#21. Apparently, he was too busy living his own life to be a character in the imaginary novel that was mine.
Melissa Kantor
#22. Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary.
Jean Baudrillard
#23. The imaginary is what tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#24. There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
#25. After a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.
Chris Marker
#26. The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
Rebecca Solnit
#29. A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#30. Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
George Bernard Shaw
#31. The shortest way to get to the real answer is via the imaginary
Joanna Tilsley
#32. Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.
David Antin
#34. The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#35. I am giddy, expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense.
William Shakespeare
#36. And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit.
Allen Ginsberg
#37. There's a level of realism you can only achieve through the imaginary.
Fumito Ueda
#38. Real teachers like Jesus, Buddha, Nanak, Rumi have much more to teach humanity, than the imaginary figure Krishna, concocted by an ancient Indian man named Vyasa.
Abhijit Naskar
#39. The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you.
Sanford Meisner
#40. Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another.
Ambrose Bierce
#41. Most people experience history as one damn fact after another in high school. But if you can wonder, "Wow, what if the US hadn't gotten involved in World War II?", you can become enthralled by the imaginary possibilities.
Gavriel David Rosenfeld
#42. Yeah, I know what "off the horse" means. I just can't remember how we got to the point where I'm defending myself against the imaginary accusations of a man who gives hairless rats to neighborhood children, and who apparently trusts the nonexistent squirrel junkies in the attic.
Jenny Lawson
#43. Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters.
Maxine Cheshire
#44. I believe in numbers. The ones you can see and the ones you can't. The real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, and every point on lines that go on forever. Numbers have never let me down. They don't waffle. They don't lie. They don't pretend to be what they're not. They're timeless.
Amy Harmon
#45. The line separating the real from the imaginary is infinitesimally small. Or is it there at all?
Ben McKinnon
#46. The danger lies not in the imaginary hydra of revolution, but in a stubborn traditionalism that impedes progress.
Leo Tolstoy
#47. Left him delighted with the imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
Ezra Pound
#48. In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.
Paul Klee
#49. I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have inside your head.
John Scalzi
#51. To connect is to dissolve the imaginary pyramids of artificial privilege.
Stefan Molyneux
#52. Imagination is the parallel universe of a writer. If he is not responding to you in this world, he is probably responding to someone in the imaginary world.
Heenashree Khandelwal
#53. The imaginary audience for my life is growing small and silent.
Mason Cooley
#54. The imaginary world has always been the most fun place for me to be.
Claire Forlani
#55. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
Virginia Woolf
#56. Who I am finally, if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself?
Anne Desclos
#57. I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.
Annie Leibovitz
#58. Our passion for fear consumes us and gives birth to the imaginary. Once fear is unleashed, it feeds upon us and rips us apart like a wild animal. Its hold is great, narrow is the escape and treacherous the road. I know of what I speak, for I was once his victim.
Nancy B. Brewer
#59. It's scary to me to watch the world around us get less and less physical while in the imaginary world of pop culture, aggressive impulses and fear reactions are floridly, furiously stoked and indulged.
Mary Gaitskill
#60. Under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands?
Bruno Schulz
#61. Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
George Santayana
#62. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Karl Marx
#63. In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.
Roland Barthes
#64. Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
Federico Fellini
#65. With each step I take I am:
Growing stronger, more spiritual and wiser. Climbing and conquering the imaginary mountains in my mind. Releasing the destroying hurt in my heart. Defeating the fearful giants in my soul. All for the purpose of making a new and improved me.
Timothy Pina
#66. The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man's chains. Man must throw off the flowers, and also the chains.
Karl Marx
#67. A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.
Laura Miller
#68. She's not talking to me. She's talking to the Imaginary Daily Mail Judge, who constantly watches her life and gives it marks out of ten.
Sophie Kinsella
#69. The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary ...
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#70. We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.
Tim DeKay
#71. From these few observations we can already conclude that the real is never beautiful. Beauty is a value applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#72. When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.
Alexandre Dumas
#73. I cannot conceive why people will always mix up my own character and opinions with those of the imaginary beings which, as a poet, I have the right and liberty to draw.
George Gordon Byron
#74. There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.
Lionel Shriver
#75. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
Siri Hustvedt
#76. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel Foucault
#77. Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
Ann Patchett
#78. As a man cannot lift a mountain, and as a kindly man cannot kill an infant, so a man living the Christian life cannot take part in deeds of violence. Of what value then to him are arguments about the imaginary advantages of doing what is morally impossible for him to do?
Leo Tolstoy
#79. It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
Nicola Chiaromonte
#80. Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?
Jean-Luc Godard
#81. Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
#82. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
Louis Althusser
#83. [Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.
Gottfried Leibniz
#84. In the dance of infatuation, we see others not as they are, but as projections of who we want them to be. And we impose on them all the imaginary criteria we think will fill the void in our hearts.
Neil Strauss
#85. The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#86. He was the man I mentioned who was obsessed by the idea that he had cancer, although X-rays had proved to him that it was all imaginary. Who or what caused this idea? It obviously derived from a fear that was not caused by observation of the facts. It suddenly overcame him and then remained.
C. G. Jung
#87. ... 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
#88. Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
Samuel Johnson
#89. Possibly the strangest book ever made, the 'Codex Seraphinianus' is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy - it is written in an alphabet no one can understand - and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.
Russell Smith
#90. The irony of talking to animals and an imaginary girlfriend, who keep me sane, even though I know I look like a raving lunatic, isn't lost on me.
Elyse Draper
#91. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.
Louisa May Alcott
#93. I was like, what the hell is my life coming to? I'm a trained actor! I've done Shakespeare and here I am having farting contests with an imaginary dog!
Matthew Lillard
#94. There is this of good in real evils; they deliver us, while they last, from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.
Charles Caleb Colton
#95. They forgot who she was:
Something fantastic we could never explain. Someone better and bolder than every one of us. Someone to paint murals and build bridges for. Someone worth every ounce of our love.
Someone powerful, but in the end not powerful enough.
Nova Ren Suma
#96. PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#97. Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
George Eliot
#98. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one's work so as to obtain an objective, true picture of reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
#99. The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.
H.L. Mencken
#100. When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
Paul Auster
