Top 100 What Is The Imagination Quotes
#1. But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?
Howard Jacobson
#2. What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child's education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#4. The problem is that most of us have limited our imagination to what we have been told is possible - and usually we've been told by people without much experience.
Barbara Sher
#5. The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,' you know what I mean?
Noah Hawley
#6. I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
Paul Theroux
#7. What is reality but the dreamworld of a limited imagination.
Robert Breault
#8. When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
Rollo May
#9. 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
#10. I think you're an improvement on my imagination," I said, flipping back through the pages.
"You, too," he said. "My imagination - well, what little imagination I have - doesn't quite live up to the real thing."
"Agreed," I said. "The real thing is much better.
Francesca Zappia
#11. What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.
Frida Kahlo
#12. Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#13. 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
#14. When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness.
Mahmoud Darwish
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.
George Tyrrell
#18. You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.
Konstantin Stanislavski
#19. A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#20. Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know - that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.
Daniel Gilbert
#21. I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.
Jim Shepard
#22. 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
#23. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's "real life" is a phantom of one's own imagination.
Tim Challies
#24. The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money ... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
Alan Watts
#25. I'm still trying to defog the bathroom mirror to see the dream for what it clearly is.
From A Wildflower
#26. Grandchildren have taught me how important the future is. I try to look through their eyes and envision what's in their imagination. What's the world going to look like when they're my age? That really does take a huge imagination.
Richard Lugar
#27. Imagination is a process of seeing events or things with the minds eye.
Debasish Mridha
#28. 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
#29. What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.
R.M. Engelhardt
#30. What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#31. What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.
Barbara Tuchman
#32. Experience has taught me this: you've done everything you needed to do, and there's no sense in rehashing it. All you can do now is wait for the race. And what instinct has taught me is one thing only: use your imagination.
Haruki Murakami
#33. That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
George Berkeley
#34. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#35. Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.
David Hume
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. In acting, every day is different, and I guess it appeals to my storytelling imagination. But I've been very fortunate to get the chance to do what I want to do and earn a living from it to pay the mortgage.
Emilia Fox
#39. I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.
Nikola Tesla
#40. I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand.
Anna White
#41. The lack of magic is what leads humans to fantasize in the first place. And Alyssa, what a wonderfully powerful force an imagination can be.
A.G. Howard
#43. The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination ... you can make feast of straw.
Jane Stanton Hitchcock
#44. What do you do when your head - your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?
You focus on the really good ones!
Storm Princeholm
#45. 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
#46. The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#47. 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
#48. He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.
Jack Finney
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion.
Debasish Mridha
#52. I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?
Jane Campion
#53. But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me.
Abel Ferrara
#54. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
Vincent Buranelli
#55. What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.
Diane Ackerman
#56. Out of love, women become entirely what it is that they are in the imaginations of the men who love them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.
Rose Tremain
#58. The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but that it happened at all.
Jack Goody
#59. Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.
Iain Pears
#60. 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
#61. Disassociation. It is a word I have heard before but never in reference to that mind trick I had used to cope. That trick isn't a figment of my imagination. It was real. It had a name. And if the coping mechanism was real, it means what I have experienced was real too.
Elizabeth Esther
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
Stefan Zweig
#65. 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
#67. Non fiction? Non fiction?! Listen, reality is what got me into this mess in the first place.
Justin Alcala
#68. 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
#69. Imagination is powerful. Imagination is healing. All you need is the courage to visualize what should be, and then give yourself to its creation. The result may not be what you expected, but it will be right.
Gabrielle Roth
#70. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
Claire Colebrook
#71. The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!
E.T.A. Hoffmann
#72. The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God.
J. W. N. Sullivan
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When
Richard Feynman
#76. I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
#77. With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?
Iain Sinclair
#78. What you call magic is nothing more than an act of the imagination fired by the senses, then given shape by the power of your aura.
Michael Scott
#79. Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.
John Armstrong
#80. 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
#81. "What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and maybe a prisoner of it as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#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. Christians are meant to be God's holy counterculture, showing the world what a society of love can look like. It is about political imagination and what it means to be the peculiar people of God. As
Shane Claiborne
#84. 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
#85. Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
D. A. Carson
#86. P5-what they need..is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It this this quality..what may be called the sociological imagination.
C. Wright Mills
#87. For me, as I've said many times, the story is not research. The story is how the characters relate with each other and with the environment ... I try to apply my imagination to what could have happened and how a little child could have viewed and processed the event ...
Uwem Akpan
#88. The freedom of personal expression, ideas and imagination, working in collaboration with people from diverse backgrounds - is what's needed to spawn creativity.
Larry R. Thompson
#89. 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
#90. You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.
Henri Bergson
#91. A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W. Somerset Maugham
#92. Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#93. Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.
Esther Perel
#94. 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
#95. I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.
John Guare
#96. The difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied.
John Dewey
#97. I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on.
Dave Attell
#98. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
Alan Greenspan
#99. Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it.
S.A. Tawks
#100. The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
