Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
—Anna Freud (1895–1982) Austrian-British Child Psychoanalyst
The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
The “evil imagination “takes advantage only of visible objects.
—The Talmud Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
—Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American Author, Journalist, Attorney, Lecturer
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
See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession.
—Robert Collier (1885–1950) American Self-Help Author
It is important to rely on your imagination for your sense of humor and your memory for your truths. Not the other way around.
—Unknown
In contemplation, if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English Philosopher
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
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
What is now proved was once only imagin’d.
—William Blake (1757–1827) English Poet, Painter, Printmaker
The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him…. He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator
By visualizing your goals, you can get your subconscious to work toward making these mental pictures come true.
—Unknown
Imagination gallops; judgment merely walks.
—Common Proverb
When we read a book, our most essential trait – imagination – is given the opportunity to soar.
—Augustine of Hippo (354–430) Roman-African Christian Philosopher
Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.
—Les Brown
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.
—John D. MacDonald (1916–86) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Man is an imagining being.
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet
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.
—William Blake (1757–1827) English Poet, Painter, Printmaker
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
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
The human race is governed by its imagination.
—Napoleon I (1769–1821) Emperor of France
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.
—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 Anglican Author, Mathematician, Clergyman, Photographer, Logician
A vile imagination, once indulged, gets the key of our minds, and can get in again very easily, whether we will or no, and can so return as to bring seven other spirits with it more wicked than itself; and what may follow no one knows.
—Charles Spurgeon (1834–92) English Baptist Preacher
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn’t. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
—Unknown
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) American Poet
The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
—Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French Political leader, Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, Critic
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922) French Novelist
The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.
—Charles M. Schwab (1862–1939) American Businessperson
Pictures help you to form the mental mold…
—Robert Collier (1885–1950) American Self-Help Author
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 Novelist, Writer
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 Books Writer, Writer, Cartoonist, Animator
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination. If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.
—Annie Dillard (b.1945) Essayist, Novelist, Poet, Naturalist, Mystic
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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 human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
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
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) English Journalist, Author, Media Personality, Satirist
The Gleam of an heroic act,
Such strange illumination—
The Possible’s slow fuse it lit
By the Imagination.
—Emily Dickinson (1830–86) American Poet
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
—John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy…. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture … Do not build obstacles in your imagination … Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
—Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American Clergyman, Self-Help Author