Top 100 The Imaginary Quotes
#1. Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.
Theodore Newton Vail
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. ... 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. ... 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.
Shepherd Hoodwin
#23. Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.
Nicole Brossard
#24. Any guy, even imaginary, would just feel like second best. Second best to what? I don't even have an image of the perfect boyfriend. I just know he must exist. Because I have all these feelings-love, longing, wanting to be touched, dreaming of being kissed-yet no one to focus them on.
Tabitha Suzuma
#25. I spent my childhood in an imaginary world - probably because I needed an escape. I think that's one of the reasons people have imaginations - because they can't maintain existence here.
Rickie Lee Jones
#26. 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
#27. PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
Ambrose Bierce
#28. In his books, Tolle repeatedly denigrated the habit of worrying, which he characterized as a useless process of projecting fearfully into an imaginary future. "There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn't exist.
Dan Harris
#29. One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.
Sunwolf
#30. There are very few of us that do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary
Jane Austen
#31. Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one; and most of the finest products of an applied mathematician's fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have been created, for the brutal but sufficient reason that they do not fit the facts.
G.H. Hardy
#32. You may tell me that my hand and foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence. I could believe you, but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the spiritual is not the true and real part of me.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#33. 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
#34. One good, compassionate and caring Self is a thousand times greater than all the fanciful, imaginary supernatural entities in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#35. Reading requires a loner's temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead.
David Samuels
#36. 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
#37. Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty
the shame of being thought poor
it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
William Cobbett
#38. The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.
Liane Moriarty
#39. History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia.
Herodotus
#40. Bethany." His quiet voice intruded.
Her heart turned over heavily. "This is real right?"
His face contorted as if he were in pain. "Yes, it's real."
Crazy people probably did things like this all the time. Asked their imaginary alien friends if they were real, and of course, they'd say yes.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#41. When you strive for perfection, you compare different versions of what could be instead of being present with what is. Perfectionism is an attempt to inhabit an imaginary world in order to avoid experiencing the world in which you live.
Gary Zukav
#42. The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people's heads.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. I'm of the age and immaturity level that I cannot give you my respect solely because you are older or ranked higher on an imaginary totem pole. I give you my respect because of your actions.
Erica Goros
#44. They feel very stupid and strange, the things going through your mind. You're making us very tired, with all your thinking of stupid imaginary impossible things.
Orson Scott Card
#45. When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.
Robert Krulwich
#46. Imaginary (thinking) leads to bliss of the mind and the true (real thinking) leads to bliss of the Self (Soul).
Dada Bhagwan
#47. its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untravelled woods.
C.S. Lewis
#48. 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
#49. Acting is the ability to live truthfully under the given imaginary circumstances
Sanford Meisner
#50. 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
#51. If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games? And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.
Suzanne Collins
#52. Through the power of art imaginary landscapes turn into real ones.
Marty Rubin
#53. I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#54. 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
#55. People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist.
Milan Kundera
#56. I dont get that
people going to war over religion. I dont know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if youre going to war over religion, now youre just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend.
Richard Jeni
#57. The desire for imaginary benefits often involves the loss of present blessings.
Aesop
#58. The smallest thing in this universe is an intelligent living creature.
He sets himself to be imaginary in the premises of arrogant scientist.
Toba Beta
#59. My mom said I was an escapist at heart ... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one
Amy Plum
#60. Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums ... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
John Green
#61. Bubba was the one person who wouldn't even bat an eyelash that Nick was talking to an "imaginary" friend. Heck, he'd probably bring one of his own out to play, too.
~Nick
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#62. The clouds are thick as cotton and laced in silver from the sun, and she thinks back to what Oliver said on the plane, the word taking shape in her mind: cumulus. The one cloud that seemed both imaginary and true at the same time.
Jennifer E. Smith
#63. Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said, not being able to stop myself. "What's the i?"
"The i is an imaginary number," he said, and coughed.
"There are imaginary numbers now?" I said in disbelief. "Are there unicorns in the next lesson?
Chris Colfer
#64. The imaginary is that which tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#65. You reduce illegal immigration by making it harder to get jobs here, or easier to get jobs south of the border. This idea that we can't pass an immigration law until we hit some imaginary security target is just a way to derail reform.
Gail Collins
#66. Real atheist is not the one that does not believe in an imaginary big monkey, but the one that gives the imagination more importance than the reality.
Abhijit Naskar
#67. Your imaginary friend isn't the problem, Amanda. The problem is that you don't seem to have any real friends.
Rebecca McNutt
#68. Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#69. It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!
Anne Sullivan
#70. I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life. Thinking about my mother, who's a very powerful force on me. And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life.
Junot Diaz
#71. It amazes me, every single time, to see so much certainty backed by so much ignorance and neglect on what is being believed and shared. The mass wisdom of the fools can only be compared to the egotistical need of schizophrenics with many imaginary friends.
Robin Sacredfire
#72. All novels ... are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
Milan Kundera
#73. All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
W. H. Auden
#74. If I could have one friend,
just one in all the world,
I know that I would not seek out
a boy or pretty girl.
The friend I'd dare to choose
to stand by me each day
would be a dragon fierce enough
to scare the world away.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#75. He felt the imaginary weight of shackles press against his soul. He bound himself to her once more.
Abbie Chandler
#76. She calmly raised the stun gun to her lips as if blowing away imaginary smoke. With a wry smile, she acknowledged the group of women gathered in her living room to witness her in-home presentation. "And that, ladies, is how you keep from becoming a statistic.
Stu Summers
#77. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#78. I used to love to hear stories of that man's exploits! One of my heroes, when I was young. Riding round the enemy, harassing his lines of communication, falling on the baggage train and whatnot.
The Prince's riding crop rode around, harassed, and fell on imaginary baggage in the air before him.
Joe Abercrombie
#79. Pride is the utter poverty of soul disguised as riches, imaginary light where in fact there is darkness.
John Climacus
#80. To rob the public, it is necessary to deceive them. To deceive them, it is necessary to persuade them that they are robbed for their own advantage, and to induce them to accept in exchange for their property, imaginary services, and often worse.
Frederic Bastiat
#81. And each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car's restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud, giving Aomame a strangely unsettled feeling.
Haruki Murakami
#82. When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.
Elizabeth McCracken
#83. 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
#84. I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked.
Jorge Luis Borges
#85. The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.
Robert Moss
#86. Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.
William Gibson
#87. To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#88. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.
Miles Cameron
#89. 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
#90. [W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#91. A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
W. H. Auden
#92. I'm extremely moved by the loving, caring relationship the President always seems to have with his imaginary son.
Dennis Miller
#93. The two favorite episodes of 'Lost' that Adam and I wrote were 'Dave,' which was where Hurley has an imaginary friend, and 'Trisha Tanaka is Dead,' where Hurley finds a van and starts it.
Edward Kitsis
#94. When you face the challenges of this world, be they real or what you claim to be imaginary, then face them with your heart. For everyone who loves you is in your heart. From within your heart comes the magic that makes you who you are.
Gillian Summers
#95. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
Lev Grossman
#96. Mediocrity is 'purpose' left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#97. I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.
Terry Brooks
#98. No boundary condition: The idea that the universe is finite but has no boundary (in imaginary time).
Stephen Hawking
#99. Everything in this world is the fruit of the imagination. If there is no imaginary garden in our head, we can't plant a real one.
Bakhtiyar Ali
#100. There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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