Imagination

"The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’s fate."

"creativity is not the monopoly of the Shakespeares and Einsteins of this world. There is a science of intelligent living, an art of being fully human, in which we all can and ought to be creative. To use our imagination is part of the total art of being. To imagine other people's imagination is part of the art of being with others."

"We should train ourselves in the use of imagination when we are well, so that we are ready to use it when we are not...Like any other faculty, imagination can be starved and suffocated or stimulated and nourished."

"A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it."

"Imagination is the air of mind."

"Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it."

"All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!"

"My God, how can you stand such things, children? They say, "Mom, don't you know it is only television, it is not real.""

"That neither our Thoughts, nor Passions, nor Ideas formed by the Imagination, exist without the Mind, is what every Body will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various Sensations or Ideas imprinted on the Sense... cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving them... For as to what is said of the absolute Existence of unthinking Things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their Esse is Percipi, nor is it possible they should have any Existence, out of the Minds or thinking Things which perceive them."

"IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership."

"Come with me and you'll be In a world of pure imagination Take a look and you'll see Into your imagination."

"The word "imagination" is... in my title. I want you to think of the following words: visual, vision, and visionary; and image, imagery, imagination. ..."Imagination" is a word which derives from the making of images in the mind, from what Wordsworth called "the inward eye.""

"What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine."

"Build castles in the air."

"When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak."

"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?"

"Without imagination of the one kind or the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business. . . . Illumined by the imagination, our life - whatever its defeats and despairs - is a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery."

"Une peinture, c'est d'abord un produit de l'imagination de l'artiste, ce ne doir jamais être une copie. Si, ensuite, on peut y ajouter deux ou trois accents de nature, evidemment ca ne fait pas de mal."

"C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire."

"Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it."

"It is your key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world."

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Imagination was the great cozener of the past."

"The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, “Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next?” When we say, “I can’t imagine,” they may think we have a weak imagination. They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know: that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can’t allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game. One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a strait jacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is. The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty."

"Al right. I already see you turning off. I can see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it!" Tough! I don't like it either, but that's the way it is! Ok? I don't understand it either. ..."It must be that Nature knows that it's going to go up or down." No, it must not be that nature knows! We are not to tell Nature what she's gotta be! That's what we found out. Every time we take a guess as how she's got to be, and go and measure... She's clever. She's always got better imagination than we have, and she finds a cleverer way to do it than we have thought of. And in this particular case, the clever way to do it is by probability, by odds."

"There is nothing more important than developing your imagination to transform your life from the inside world of your thoughts and feelings to the outside world of your results and manifestations."

"I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo."

"When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet."

"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination."

"Much memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience. Againe, Imagination being only of those things which have been formerly perceived by Sense, either all at once, or by parts at severall times; The former, (which is the imagining the whole object, as it was presented to the sense) is simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person, with the image of the actions of an other man; as when a man imagins himselfe a Hercules, or an Alexander, (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of Romants) it is a compound imagination, and properly but a Fiction of the mind. There be also other Imaginations that rise in men, (though waking) from the great impression made in sense: As from gazing upon the Sun, the impression leaves an image of the Sun before our eyes a long time after; and from being long and vehemently attent upon Geometricall Figures, a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles before his eyes: which kind of Fancy hath no particular name; as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into mens discourse."

"the power of imagination leads us to what's real... it's a bridge toward reality."

"I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them. (1990)"

"The explanation of every event as repetition, that the Enlightenment upholds against mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself. That arid wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun … merely reproduces the fantastic wisdom that it supposedly rejects: … fate that … remakes what has already been."

"Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings."

"But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of those people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of diversion."

"Fantasy, or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies are literal; productive' when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes."

"When I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the “o” in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play... I do not remember my friend’s house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her. (9 September 1950)"

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself."

"By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets."

"[H]e who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous; and again, only by a shameful abuse [of terms] do we think that we are saying different things, when we are merely using different words, different sounds, to which no idea or real distinction is attached."

"The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may, with equal truth, be applied to the imagination—it is a good servant, but a bad master."

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did."

"If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters—completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy."

"I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of [the faculties of a mature human that exist in the child] is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty ... to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue."

"Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky, Imagine all the people living for today..."

"Imagine there's no countries, It isnt hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too, Imagine all the people living life in peace...You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us, And the world will be as one."

"For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition."

"An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals."