A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we’re disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
For me, it’s always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment.
You never quite know what’s going to strike your imagination, or something that won’t going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.
Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.
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.
In an era of parental paranoia, lawsuit mania and testing frenzy, we are failing to inspire our children’s curiosity, creativity, and imagination. We are denying them opportunities to tinker, discover, and explore – in short, to play.
Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author’s imagination.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.
The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too – hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.
We didn’t have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.
The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide.
For some reason I can’t explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you’re doing and keep your imagination open. That’s a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
Few people have the imagination for reality.
You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.
Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it’s a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
I had a very active imagination as a kid, and I was constantly performing, whether I was making money doing it or not, whether it was on a stage in front of 1,000 people or in the living room in front of my family.
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost – the lost valleys of the imagination.
Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.
Imagination is the true magic carpet.
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That’s why I don’t mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.
You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That’s what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don’t go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they’re not going to have that imagination.
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.
What I love most about animation is, it’s a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.
Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it’s always been there. It’s been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had.
It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination.
I don’t want to go on much longer, really. I think that would suggest a lack of imagination. A certain lack of dignity also.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
Well, I think that – I think leadership’s always been about two main things: imagination and courage.
People are always saying it’s the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it’s a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it’s a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.
Use your imagination, and you’ll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination – everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
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.
I’ve proven I’m courageous. I’m gutsier than anybody; I’ve got a better imagination than anybody; I’m essentially more creative than any other actor I know, and I’ve proven I take risks. I don’t think I need to prove anything to myself any more.
For me, my travels have been the chance to go to a place that already exists in my imagination.
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.
It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
I’ve been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It’s up to you, the only limit is the imagination.
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily life.
Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.
I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
As an actor I think sometimes producers need a little bit of encouragement to see you in a particular role, they may not have as much imagination as you would expect.
Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west’s stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art’s assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.
