Top 121 Imaginary Quotes

Certainly, no studio is going to put its money and its muscle behind something that they don’t think they can spin five or six movies out of and build a whole kind of imaginary universe from anymore, I think.

So many people are focused on reaching the top of an imaginary ladder that they don’t enjoy the climb.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

Endless are the instances of men of bright parts and high spirit having been, by degrees, rendered powerless and despicable by their imaginary wants.

One of the reasons I got into acting to begin with is that I was trying to figure out how life worked. It was interesting to me to try and follow how other people, real or imaginary, would deal with problems, because I was trying to deal with my own problems.

It is not right to associate the fight against international terrorist networks with an imaginary crusade against Islam.

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.

The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.

What’s interesting about the ‘Smash Bros.’ games, is that the ‘Smash Bros.’ games do not represent the Nintendo characters fighting against one another: they actually represent toys of Nintendo characters getting into an imaginary battle amongst themselves.

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.

I never had an imaginary friend, just imaginary circumstances. I was so into the Indiana Jones movies, and I would constantly reenact circumstances. I broke my left arm three times, two of which were me trying to be Indiana Jones.

We must stop trying to protect our planet from every imaginable, exaggerated or imaginary risk. And we must stop trying to protect it on the backs, and the graves, of the nation’s and world’s most powerless and impoverished people.

I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don’t mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn’t need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.

I was hurt when someone on television said that we film people live in an imaginary world and the sportsmen live in reality. I would like to tell them that we live very much in reality and the amount of hard work we do, I doubt anyone in this country can or in the world can do.

Atreyu comes from a land called Fantasia. It’s an imaginary land.

Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

It’s a brilliant job. I’m literally paying my mortgage by fighting imaginary dragons.

Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it’s often largely imaginary – or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.

I like cartoons. I like ‘Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.’ It’s funny! It has things that kids wouldn’t get. It’s like, if you’re mature, you get it. I like that and ‘The Fairly OddParents.’

The word ‘God’ usually signifies ‘Lord’, but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God.

I never understood the realism of an imaginary circumstance. While I was doing ‘Smoke Signals,’ I relied on my instinct and what I grew up with. I had this energy, but it was a one-dimensional thing.

Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was… an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.

I did have an imaginary girlfriend.

As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother – wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There’s no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young.

I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, ‘We’re learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people.

I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

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.

As a child, I felt that Hallowe’en was a time when creatures of the night suddenly came to life – we would turn off all the lights in the house and let flickering candlelight conjure up scary shadows and create the effect of imaginary figures lurking in dark corners.

In Washington, you have imaginary problems, and they can’t even solve the imaginary problems.

I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn’t matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present, as long as the story is compelling.

When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audience listening to my story.

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, ‘Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.’

I used to say that ‘happy’ was like ‘lucky,’ kind of imaginary. But now that I’m married and have children, I find that happiness is a real space.

I’ve always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form.

Escapism or nostalgia, for me, is not about having a terrible life and trying to get away via imaginary ideas or something.

I was a real daydreamer at school, gazing out of the window and losing myself in imaginary worlds.

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I’d constantly be that guy who’d get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

I think I’ve always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was ‘your’ boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get ‘you.’

Certainly I was a very religious child, a deeply weird and very emotional child, an only child with lots of imaginary friends and a very active imagination. I loved Sunday school and Bible camp and all that. I had my own white Bible with Jesus’ words printed in red in the text; I even spoke at youth revivals.

The future is, of course, imaginary – an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to – it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.

In a sense, if you’re not getting it wrong really a lot when you’re creating imaginary futures, then you’re just not doing it enough. You’re not creating enough imaginary futures.

I remember in grade school having a group of friends and enjoying that sense of community, enjoying living in an imaginary world that wasn’t just by yourself or your sibling but a whole group of people.

Don’t wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary ‘what if’ scenarios dreamed up in a conference room.

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!

The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.

A lot of people fear failures, struggling, they want overnight success and they live in their fake imaginary world.

I think having imaginary friends is an amazing coping mechanism. It’s pretty wonderful, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.

I spent my entire Irish Catholic youth in a constant state of guilt over imaginary sins. I learned that nothing is a sin as long as you don’t take pleasure from it.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

All writers are obviously neurotic… For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

Funk could very easily be called jazz, but you call it funk. Does that really matter? People dig that they associate themselves with certain genres, but the genres to me are made up things, like an imaginary world.

It’s strange: I always try to do the best acting job I can do under the imaginary circumstances of my working position at any given time. But it’s terrible when you know it’s going bad, and you know it immediately. But you just have to still try to do the best job you can.

It’s my fond hope that social networks such as Facebook will help users broaden their perspectives by listening to a different set of people than they encounter in their daily life. But I fear services such as Facebook may be turning us into imaginary cosmopolitans.

I’ve written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city’s Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.

Growing up as a chubby kid with a ton of imaginary friends and a Cyndi Lauper obsession, I learned about rejection early on and was constantly trying to avoid it.

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

I had this imaginary world where fairies were my friends. If you told six-year-old Juno that she’d one day play a Disney fairy, she’d totally freak out.

I played ACC and NCAA Tournament games in my backyard – these imaginary games – and when I finally got to experience it in real life, it was better than I could imagine.

From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.

Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one… If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

I was the kid next door’s imaginary friend.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it’s difficult to conceive that there’s a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

I’ve always felt like, you know, there’s this imaginary wall that we ourselves put up or others do by saying that we can’t do something.

When I was a teenager, I continued to visit imaginary places by spending all my free time at our local community theater. Whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

It’s really unnatural to be in a room full of people watching you on screen. It’s exposing. Your little imaginary world is up on screen. They can see what I’ve been thinking about! It’s very odd.

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.

I never really did abandon my true self. It’s not like I invented this imaginary person and started to be her.

When people lay around whining to their therapists and ex-wives that they’re finally going to ‘change’ themselves, they are promising something imaginary and made up.

But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries.

I really could’ve been a good student, but I was always hearing an imaginary audience.

I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I’d try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.

I really loved animals when I was little – my friend and I had an imaginary vet’s office; we would mime doing surgery on animals. We treated more injuries than illnesses – fixing with a baby bear with a broken leg, removing a tumor. Of course, our surgeries would take about five seconds; that’s how good we were.

When I was a kid I’d swing imaginary light sabers around, and now I’ve had the opportunity to get paid for it.

Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren’t.

My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With ‘How to Save a Life’, I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.

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.

Football has end zones and goal posts; basketball has the hoop, and hockey the goal cage. Baseball is the only game with an imaginary box: the strike zone, which the umpire determines at his own discretion.

I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields – it’s very refreshing.

When I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies at all. And actually, one of the genesis points for ‘Mandy’ and ‘Black Rainbow’ was this memory I have of being in video stores, reading the backs of videos and looking at the art, imagining some kind of non-existent imaginary film based on that.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, ‘Please let me live to write another one.’

We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.

My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That’s the kind of thing we would talk about.

I’m not interested in an imaginary world.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

I’ve studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It’s mainly about daydreaming. And the technique’s really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn’t happen, but it might have.

Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.

All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can’t be taught. All the great actors can’t talk about what they do, and they don’t want to begin to talk about it. They just do it.

Going to bed can cause imaginary conversations you should have had with certain people or real conversations with your brother who is calling from a bar in a different time zone.

Sometimes I’m stressed and I’m sick of things and I need to forget about them for a while, so in Harry Potter you’re taken to this wonderful imaginary world where everything is so different.

When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else’s imaginary world.

I would hate to be in high school now. Psychologists talk about the ‘imaginary audience’ that teens seem to feel they have around them and that makes them think they have to keep up their image all the time. Now with Facebook and MySpace and 24/7 online access, that imaginary audience has become real.

My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I’d look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.

James’s expedition to Scotland is wholly imaginary, though there appears to have been space for it during Henry’s progress to the North to pay his devotions at Beverley Minster.

During a fight with Anderson Silva, I slipped on an imaginary banana peel.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world – and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.

I was always dressing up as a kid in the backyard, building some sort of fort and having battles against imaginary enemies. It’s often that same feeling when you’re pretending for a living, but it’s with bigger toys.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman’s idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman’s idea of the real.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Zuri is slowly starting to become more of who I am in real life. Starting on ‘Jessie,’ she had a huge imagination, and had her imaginary friends, but now that she’s 13 she has definitely passed that stage in her life and has grown so much.

Filmmaking for me is always aiming for the imaginary movie and never achieving it.

I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We’re still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.

I realized I couldn’t be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.