quotations about imagination
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Choke
The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.
JOHN L. MASON
You're Born an Original
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed -- or cursed -- with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. COETZEE
Waiting for the Barbarians
Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.
WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER
Nightpiece
What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.
CHRIS ABANI
Technology, Oct. 2007
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Back to Methuselah
As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Life is an exploration of the potential of the world to be a screen onto which our fantasy and imaginative life can shine. Happiness comes from seeing life for what you imagine it to be.
COLM O'CONNOR
The Courage to Be Happy
I believe imagination is our premium resource. We carry within us the lost diversity this planet needs. Engaging our individual expression, using imagination to inform, expand, and guide us, we can begin to return to Eden.
SUZANNE BETH STINNETT
Little Shifts
This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
ROD SERLING
The Twilight Zone
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. LEWIS
Selected Literary Essays
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick"