Top 100 What Is Imagination Quotes
#1. As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my job to make you as unsure as I am.
Kathryn Mattingly
#2. I know it's easy to imagine, But it's easier to just do, See, if you can't do what you imagine, then what is imagination to you?
Kid Cudi
#3. What is Imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can't the youngster protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over?
Ivan Doig
#4. Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.
Pieter Geyl
#5. What's cool is when you're able to give your audience imagination and you don't have to cage them in like animals.
Shia Labeouf
#6. What's in front of you is a whole world of experiences beyond your imagination. Put yourself, and your growth and development, first.
Phylicia Rashad
#7. 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
#8. Cultivate an optimistic mind, use your imagination, always consider alternatives, and dare to believe that you can make possible what others think is impossible.
Rodolfo Costa
#9. From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It's like a prologue. You wonder, What's going on? You feel something is going to happen.
Rinko Kawauchi
#10. Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.
Ashley Judd
#11. What is greatly desired, but long deferred, gives little pleasure, when at length it is ours, for we have lived with it in imagination until we have grown weary of it, having ourselves, in the meanwhile, become other.
John Lancaster Spalding
#12. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.
Laurel Nakadate
#13. Imagination is a process of seeing events or things with the minds eye.
Debasish Mridha
#14. I feel how little it concerns me, everything that's called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.
Robert Walser
#15. Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
#16. That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
George Berkeley
#17. As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.
Rhys Ifans
#18. Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine.
Ron Johnson
#19. What acts as a far more effective circumstance for generating compassion and what, in fact, rouses us from our comfortable meditation seat is actually seeing or hearing others - encountering others directly, not just conceptually in our imagination.
Dalai Lama
#21. This is an occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.
Cennino Cennini
#22. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#23. It's been by turns frustrating and fascinating and wonderful beyond imagination. If what I suspect is true, it's one of the most important milestones in human history to acknowledge that we are not alone in the universe.
Steven M. Greer
#24. What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.
Lynda Barry
#25. what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature;
Marcus Aurelius
#26. A fantasy is something produced in the imagination, allowing you to indulge in a thought life that is very different from what you experience on a day-to-day basis. Within this realm there is no fear of discovery, no worry about being shamed; here there is only the deepest of pleasures.
K. Kiker
#27. I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply.
Debra Dean
#28. Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Francis Bacon
#29. All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.
And this one is Teddy's.
Kate Atkinson
#30. When a scene is shrouded in mist, it seems greater, nobler, and heightens the viewers' imaginative powers, increasing expectation -
like a veiled girl. Generally the eye and the imagination are more readily drawn by nebulous distance than by what is perfectly plain for all to see
Caspar David Friedrich
#31. As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.
James Arthur
#32. Imagination that compares and contrasts with what is around as well as what is better and worse is the living power and prime agent of all human perception judgement and emotional reaction.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. You can offer your vibration on purpose. That's what visualization is. That's what imagination is: projecting thought energy on purpose.
Esther Hicks
#34. What good is having an imagination if you don't use it?
Miss Lore
#35. More often than not, what stirs the imagination is best kept in the imagination, and Gwyn is aware of that, she is wise enough to know that the distance between thought and deed can be enormous, a gulf as large as the world itself.
Paul Auster
#36. Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling ... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually-that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
#37. Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.
Elizabeth Goudge
#38. Writing a story is like ruling the world. Except it's even better. How many rulers out there that you know can tell people what they say?
VanillaCreamPie8888
#39. If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#40. When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.
Andre Holland
#41. Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on - a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
#42. I'm an actor. Whether I'm on stage, in front of a camera or a microphone, what I do is the same - although with videogames it requires a lot of imagination.
Nolan North
#43. I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I'm very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I'm feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It's gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.
Steven Wright
#44. A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!
Jean Giraudoux
#45. I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.
Helen Macdonald
#46. For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.
James Gleick
#47. What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.
Carl Jung
#48. Just so we're clear, I'm not zen by any stretch of the imagination. However, what I've read about change being the only constant is a concept that I can grab onto and have used quite a lot.
Patrick Fabian
#49. A photograph must come from imagination and not be a reflection of what is.
Thierry Mugler
#50. Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is.
Yvonne Craig
#51. I've learned that guns are exceptionally challenging to use effectively, with a power that must be respected. But mostly what I've learned is that they're a lot of fun, and dangerously appealing to an active imagination.
Trieste Kelly Dunn
#52. You want to see what this is like? Then please don't use your imagination. Use experience.
Debra Anastasia
#53. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
G.K. Chesterton
#54. Sex has to do with imagination, so the sky is the limit. If you're not doing bodily harm, why shouldn't you do what turns you on?
Jack LaLanne
#55. What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it
Thomas Carlyle
#56. It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.
Mark Sheppard
#57. Theatre is pure teleportation by means of suspension.
It's a voyage into the archives of the human imagination.
A passport to all what ifs.
Natasha Tsakos
#58. The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.
Jimmy Page
#59. 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
#60. So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
Diana Krall
#61. Your imagination is more real that then the world you see, because the world you see comes from what you imagine and believe! What you believe and feel to be true is what will be your life.
Rhonda Byrne
#62. You must know where you're and see what's ahead of you, by doing that you'll be able to achieve your dreams and goals. This sort of journey is called the power of sight and the power of imagination. Without the capacity of imagination the future is doomed.
Euginia Herlihy
#63. [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
#64. I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
Terence McKenna
#65. Finish it if you choose only remember, my girl, that one may read at forty what is unsafe at twenty, and that we never can be too careful what food we give that precious yet perilous thing called imagination.
Louisa May Alcott
#66. 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
#67. Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.
William Irwin Thompson
#68. Innovation gives life to imagination by providing that it is true, real, and useful.
Debasish Mridha
#69. I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire.
Tracy K. Smith
#70. The capability of human life is beyond our imagination. What counts is the human capacity to investigate and transform our own mind and the world around us in a powerful and positive direction.
Gelek Rimpoche
#71. What is the use of having an imagination if you can't make it work for you?
Carolyn Wells
#72. Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.
Agatha Christie
#73. Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
Robert Doisneau
#75. I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.
Shigeru Miyamoto
#76. In a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.
Alison Lurie
#77. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson
#78. What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.
Timothy Keller
#79. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.
Walter Brueggemann
#80. I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.
Erin Merryn
#81. What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination
Gary Hamel
#82. The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.
Thomas Kinkade
#83. Brings [O'Brian's] achievement to a new height ... Such is O'Brian's power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next. That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O'Brian a Master of the Art.
Alan Judd
#84. What we are after is first noticing and then participating in the way the large world of the Bible absorbs the much smaller world of our science and economics and politics that provides the so-called worldview in which we are used to working out our daily concerns.
Eugene H. Peterson
#85. The wonderful thing is, imagination is universal all over the world, no matter what the language is.
Roy Horn
#86. Fear is often bred of an imagination that couldn't let something be what it actually was.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#87. What is reality today was but a dream and an imagination not that long ago.
Debasish Mridha
#88. Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.
Quincy Jones
#89. The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
D.H. Lawrence
#90. Sometimes a story catches your imagination so much it has to be told. That is what I love about writing. It lets the images in your mind burst forth into words drawing a vivid picture that takes you away on a journey that would otherwise be impossible.
S. E. Smith
#91. Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.
Terence McKenna
#92. If they want to talk about aliens and anything like that ... that's part of the gift God gave us. That's what makes life exciting. We're pretty stuck, you know. What gives flight to our life is our imagination.
Michael Moriarty
#93. The perfect opening is the word imagine, because imagine allows you to communicate in the eyes and the vision of the listener rather than yours. And the best illustration of that is "1984." Room 101 in "1984" - everyone's read it, and we all have our own imagination of what that looks like.
Frank Luntz
#94. Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#95. I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
Terry Pratchett
#96. 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
#97. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.
Kate Forsyth
#98. Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.
Katee Sackhoff
#99. Possibility, or what we refer to as imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%. The problem is, this 1% is simultaneously referred to as Evil.
Kouhei Kadono
#100. I don't think George Bush is a good president by any imagination, but when he said, 'If you're talking to Al-Quaeda, we want to know what it's about,' it just proves one thing: If you're president long enough, you will one day say something that is true.
Bill Maher
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