It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1934–2002) American Writer, Essayist, Critic
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.
—Katherine Paterson (b.1932) American Children’s Author
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?
—Cesare Pavese (1908–50) Italian Novelist, Poet, Critic, Translator
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination … And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922) French Novelist
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.—Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all the evils arise which render us unhappy.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) Swiss-born French Philosopher
Whatever makes the past or future predominate over the present, exalts us in the scale of thinking beings.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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.
—Maxwell Maltz (1899–1975) American Surgeon, Motivational Writer
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
—Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832–98) British Author, Mathematician, Clergyman, Logician
Imagination is the true magic carpet.
—Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American Clergyman, Self-Help Author
Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.
—Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian-American Electrical Engineer, Inventor
If you don’t daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination, you never get there. So you have to start someplace.
—Robert Duvall (b.1931) American Actor, Filmmaker
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
—Unknown
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Peak performers develop powerful mental images of the behavior that will lead to the desired results. They see in their mind’s eye the result they want, and the actions leading to it.
—Charles A. Garfield (b.1944) American Psychologist
Fear is only an illusion. It is the illusion that creates the feeling of separateness—the false sense of isolation that exists only in your imagination.
—Jeraldine Saunders (1923–2019) American Writer, Television Personality
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (1904–91) American Children’s Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
I doubt the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, that child would grow up to be an eggplant.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
The “Spirit of Evil “entices a man in this world, and testifies against him in the next.
—The Talmud Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith
If you clearly and vividly IMAGINE yourself in the first person doing, being, having the things and qualities you truly want… then you will be using positive imagination to begin a change to fulfilling that image.
—Unknown
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Imagination is our ability to see inwardly and picture there that which has not yet appeared outwardly. Imagination is God’s gift to us.
—Donald Curtis (1915–97) American Actor, Religious Minister
The “evil imagination “takes advantage only of visible objects.
—The Talmud Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
—Charles Simic (1938–2023) Serbian-American Poet
The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
—Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American Author, Journalist, Attorney, Lecturer
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