99 Imagination Quotes

1.  One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet. Joseph Joubert
2. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges
3. I've never really had a problem with the imagination level of an audience. They're always smarter and savvier than any studio exec will give them credit for. James Van Der Beek
4. It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination. Edmund Burke
6. All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth. Napoleon Hill
7. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. Michelangelo
8. My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead. Nicole Kidman
9. Imagination needs to be fed. Barbara Januszkiewicz
10. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination. John Keats
11. Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine. Rita Dove
12. This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts. Adam Smith
13. What's in front of you is a whole world of experiences beyond your imagination. Put yourself, and your growth and development, first. Phylicia Rashad
14. The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them. John Desmond Bernal
15. A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations. Russell Page
16. I've got quite a vivid imagination and I'm easily overwhelmed by sensations and things that are beautiful or scary. I don't think I've ever seen a ghost - I think I'm probably haunted by my own ghosts than real ones. Florence Welch
17. 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
18. Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition. Joshua Foer
19. My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest. Andrew Bird
20. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality. Jonas Salk
21. 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
22. 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. Philip Roth
23. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. Edgar Allan Poe
24. Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. Plato
25. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination. Martha Gellhorn
26. My imagination completely controls me, and forever feeds the fire that burns with dark red light in my heart by bringing me the best dreams. I've always had a wild imagination, a big heart and a tortured soul so I feel that dark fantasy, love and horror are in my blood. Kim Elizabeth
27. You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need. Jerry Gillies
28. Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination. George Henry Lewes
29. 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
30. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist. Azar Nafisi
31. In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination. James Buchan
32. I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about. Dirk Benedict
33. An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house. Maria Callas
34. Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men. George Henry Lewes
35. My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people. John Henrik Clarke
36. Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. Karen Thompson Walker
37. My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk. John Keats
38. Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. Gloria Steinem
39. Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. Stephen Covey
40. Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction. Yann Martel
41. If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers. Bela Lugosi
42. Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination. Henry Miller
43. Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza. Franz Kafka
44. They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground. Toby Jones
45. Ultimately it's a leap of faith and a leap of imagination to put yourself back in time into those conditions and situations and see how you would react. Derek Jacobi
46. A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions. William Hazlitt
47. Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination. Judy Blume
48. My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias. Abdul Kalam
49. The human race is governed by its imagination. Napoleon Bonaparte
50. I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening. Jerzy Kosinski
51. To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another. John Burroughs
52. I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination. Mark Ruffalo
53. So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear. Diana Krall
54. For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity. Jean Dubuffet
55. You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization. Denis Waitley
56. I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world. Robert Carlyle
57. When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you. Susan Sarandon
58. The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South. James Weldon Johnson
59. I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn't that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that's when your creativity is developed, when you're young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to. David Walliams
60. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. Edward Hopper
61. Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall. Stephen Sondheim
62. You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination. Charles de Gaulle
63. I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination. Courteney Cox
64. My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. John Adams
65. If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. Karl Kraus
66. I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary, I am the organizer, I am the maid, and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling. Jane Campion
67. A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
68. It would be too frightening for me to consider myself a role model. But I like the idea of not being afraid of letting your imagination rule you, to feel the freedom of expression, to let creativity be your overwhelming drive rather than other things. Florence Welch
69. President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions. Dennis Hastert
70. The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure. Geraldine Brooks
71. I always imagined I could be what I wanted to be. Chris Brown
72. We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. Jean Giraudoux
73. I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination. Carlos Fuentes
74. Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable. Carl Jung
75. Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it. Mason Cooley
76. My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. Clara Schumann
77. It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women. Elizabeth Wurtzel
78. We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. Jacob Bronowski
79. Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination. Terry Brooks
80. I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action. James Broughton
81. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. Bruce Catton
82. Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world. Walt Disney
83. To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all. Anatole France
84. I imagine that yes is the only living thing. e. e. cummings
85. America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. Harry S. Truman
86. It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. Edgar Degas
87. I'm an emotional sort of person in general and I have a vivid imagination, so I feel the whole spectrum of emotion strongly when I write. Erin Morgenstern
88. Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore. Rob Bell
89. Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Daniel Bell
90. Only in your imagination can you revise. Fay Wray
91. Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit. Doris Day
92. Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have. James Dean
93. But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it. Karl Lagerfeld
94. I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination. Carlos Fuentes
95. On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer. Bobby Seale
96. Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future. Mason Cooley
97. My life has been a gift up to this point, and I've been blessed beyond my wildest imagination. And wherever this ride takes me is where I'm going. Sean Hannity
98. When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception. Emile Coue
99. A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning. Brad Henry