Quotes about imagination (3971 quotes, page 12)

“That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Reading , Joy

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

World

“Why do grown-ups think it's easier for children to bear secrets than the truth? Don't they know about the horror stories we imagine to explain the secrets?”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

Source: Inkheart

Children , Truth , Secret , Thinking

“He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff (Ch. XIV).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: You talk of her mind being unsettled - how the devil could it be otherwise, in her frightful isolation? And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity! From pity and charity. He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!

Flowers

“That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine…”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King (2011)
Context: "Maybe it's not metaphysics. Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--... And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have pour in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-- a hundred years? two hundred?-- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and that before maybe three of four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are... The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."

“Can no one imagine an incompetent Legend?”

John Steakley book Armor

Armor

“I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Alex Wheatley, Chapter 25, p. 208
Source: 2009, Safe Haven (2010)

Life , Way

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

Life , Secret

“The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.”

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) American writer

Source: Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers

Thinking

“Death has more in common with Love than you might imagine.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Love , Death

“Grim sighed heavily. "I swear I'm getting a migraine."
"My mom suffers from those a lot, too."
"Being around you, I imagine she does.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Moms , Suffering

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

History , Mood

“I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Life , Dreams

“I always drink at lunchtime. It helps my imagination.”

Colin Dexter The Dead of Jericho

Source: The Dead of Jericho

Drink , Help

“I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Women , People , Books

“I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.”

Quentin Crisp (1908–1999) writer, Actor

God , Speed

“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Poetry and Imagination
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

Science

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Life , Dreams

“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

Way , Revenge , Forgetting

“Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Pleasure , Dreams

“To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

Life , Freedom , Learning , Betrayal

“Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

World , Dreams

“Chin held high, Miss Ohio beamed at an imagined crowd. "I want to be a motivational speaker."
"What are you going to motivate people to do?"
Smile still in place, she cut her eyes at Adina. "You know. Motivational… stuff.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

People , Smile , Motivation

“The only thing better than imagining Dimitri carrying me in his arms was imagining him shirtless while carrying me in his arms.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

“I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Books

“I find you irritating. (Kat)
I haven’t even begun to irritate you yet. Imagine what I could do if I applied myself? (Solin)
I can imagine. I can also imagine ripping your throat out and tying my shoes with your larynx. (Kat)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: The Dream Hunter

Shoe

“I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Source: The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

World

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

Source: The Name of the Rose

“I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

People

“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Life , Soul

“We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”

Marge Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time

Source: Woman on the Edge of Time

“The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Children , World

“She learned to love him before he thought it was even possible, so he didn't have a chance to hide & mess it up & while it was a little scary at times, mainly he could not even imagine the world without her there.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Trusting Soul

Love , World , Learning , Chance

“It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Valley of Fear

Source: The Valley of Fear

Truth

“My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

World , Idea

“[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Lie , Heart

“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

“My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Feeling

“Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Source: Keeping the Moon

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

“And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

People , World

“what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

“A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.”

Ari Marmell (1974) D&D game writer

Source: Thief's Covenant

“Can you imagine those poor bastards grappling their prey, leaping over the rails, swords in hand, screaming 'Your cats! Give us all your god-damned cats!”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

Source: Red Seas Under Red Skies

God , Cats

“As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=IiKY1H0A_QEC&pg=PT102 (Hyperion, 2005).
Cf. Wisdom from It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider https://books.google.com/books?id=EEiqMIgAl3UC&pg=PA49 (White Plains, N. Y.: Peter Pauper Press, Inc., 2007), p. 49.

Children , World , Adulthood

“Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Context: ... she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."

People , Reality

“A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

School

“I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.”

Terry Brooks (1944) American writer

Life , Books

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Art

“one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

Love , Way , Baby

“Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Source: Winter Moon

Life , Dreams , Star , Future

“I love you: You imagine hearing the words from someone not related to you, someone not your best friend, but when someone you love, someone you dream about, actually says them, it makes your body melt and your breath get caught in your chest.”

Sarah Mlynowski (1977) Novelist

Source: Ten Things We Did

Love , Dreams

“because white men can't
police their imagination
black men are dying”

Claudia Rankine book Citizen: An American Lyric

Source: Citizen: An American Lyric

Men

“Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

Women , Men

“She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

“Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Feeling , Time , Heart , Personality

“Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Beauty

“Never abandon imagination”

Tony DiTerlizzi (1969) American artist, writer and producer

Source: Jimmy Zangwow's Out-of-This-World Moon-Pie Adventure

“‎When she looked up at him, it was suddenly easy for her to imagine that her fears were pointless. That he would love her no matter what she told him, and that he was the kind of man who loved her already and would love her forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Safe Haven

Source: Safe Haven

Love , Fear

“I had thought Felicity dangerous a moment ago, when she felt powerful. I was wrong. Wounded and powerless, she is more dangerous than I could imagine.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

“The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Problem

“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life , War , People , Books

“Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be Commander-in-Chief? Donald Trump can't even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he's gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he's challenged in a debate. When he sees a protestor at a rally. Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons. I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started – not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men – the ones moved by fear and pride.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), 2016 Democratic National Convention (July 28, 2016)

Men , War , Fear , Question

“I cannot imagine any objective finding that CO2 is a pollutant. If that's true, God is a polluter.”

Joe Barton (1949) United States congressional representative from Texas

Congress and global warming, Reprint of article by Greenwire, 2006-08-07 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/8/2/134832/8334,

God

“It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me... Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see', to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me; absolute freedom! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", p. 15

Idea , Thinking , Freedom , Time

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Books , Hope , Nature , Change

“Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.”

Karen Armstrong book A History of God

Source: A History of God (1993), Chapter 7, God of the Mystics

Religion , Art , Science , Animals

“I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=3gtoAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA80&dq=%22come+across+men+of+letters+who+have+written+history+without+taking+part+in+public+affairs%22
1850s and later

Men , World , History , Thinking

“I don’t know how to defend myself: surprised innocence
Cannot imagine being under suspicion.”

Pierre Corneille Rodogune

Je me défendrai mal: l'innocence étonnée
Ne peut s'imaginer qu'elle soit soupçonnée.
Rodogune, act V, scene iv
Rodogune (1644)

“The most successful people in the workplace are those who normally really like and ‘buy-into’ their employer’s mission and vision. In other words such people like what the company wishes to achieve and where it is heading. It is akin to being on a ship and liking what the ship is doing and liking where the ship is heading. Can you imagine being on a ship and not wishing to go where it is heading?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Page 62
Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse

People , Success

“The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

The New Novel (1914).

Life , Education , Parting

“Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream. In a number of cases, these ideas have become commonplace in American minds.”

Chip Berlet (1949) American political analyst

"Into the Mainstream" in Intelligence Report (Summer 2003) at the Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=105

Way , Idea , Country

“She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips toward my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, "Hello."”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Dogs , Color , Kiss , Waiting

“A few years ago I had to answer some searching questions to a Customs official about a book which I had with me, printed in Latin, and which the official suspected to be Russian; it was a jestbook, as a matter of fact, and I was so foolish as to say so, forgetting that a Latin joke is as strange to the modern imagination as a unicorn or an amphisbaena.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books , Search , Question , Forgetting

“He sees things from every point of view. He's an extraordinarily hard worker. I think he's worked for a long time, in every field. He's talented, passionate and has had an incredibly hard and full life that I'm sure you know about. I can not imagine myself having some of his experiences. You either swim or drown, but some like him go on and make every moment important. I think that's what he does.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

On Roman Polanski, as quoted in Nastassja Kinski: June 2004 Interview with Tony Bray http://www.nastassja-kinski.jp/article/tvnow_jun04/index.html

Life , Thinking , Passion , Time

“When you're interested in somebody, and you think they might be interested in you, you should point out all your beauty problems and defects right away, rather than take a chance they won't notice them... On the other hand, say you have a purely temporary beauty problem—a new pimple, lackluster hair, no-sleep eyes, five extra pounds around the middle. Still, whatever it is, you should point it out... If you don't point out these things they might think that your temporary beauty problem is a permanent beauty problem... If they really do like you for yourself, they'll be willing to use their imagination to think of what you must look like without your temporary beauty problem.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 4: Beauty

Beauty , Problem , Thinking , Sleep

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Portraits and Aphorisms (1903), Pretexts

Suffering , Joy

“By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. …I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. …We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, pp. 257, 260 & 271

Truth , World , Law , Nature

“It is not within our province to inquire by what process, and in what condition the Almighty brought matter into existence-what the space was which it occupied, or what the forms were which it assumed. Of such things we know nothing. In the depths of primeval time, the globe we inhabit may have a planetary existence, wheeling along its ethereal railway without a breathing passenger to count its periods, and without a living plant to measure the day by its opening and closing blossoms, or to mark the rolling seasons by the yearly increments of its stem. Or it may have been the theatre on which vast cycles of animal and vegetable life have been run- now its birthplace, and now its grave: But we have no data to guide us in our conjectures, and even imagination fails us if we call it to our aid. Whatever may have been, had ceased to be at the commencement of our history, when the primary rocks, forming the moten nucleus of the globe, were first exposed to the action of the elements.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Review of Vestiges (1845)

Life , History , Time , Animals

“The penis -- if you think about it -- is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable -- a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive -- practically every engineering characteristic -- towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships -- no man-made engineering structure to match it.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Philip
8 1/2 Women

Thinking , Drawing

“Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

[The Eternally Existing, Self-reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe, Preposterous Universe blog, 21 October 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-eternally-existing-self-reproducing-frequently-puzzling-inflationary-universe/]

Idea , Universe

“The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) Irish-British politician, playwright and writer

Sheridaniana, Speech in Reply to Mr. Dundas.

Memory

“There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change... It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'presents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote in 'John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage In Conversation with Daniel Charles', London/New York: Marion Boyars, 1981; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC ), p. 17, note 10
1980s

World , Problem , Reality , Change

“I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad.
The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Interview in 1979, quoted in The Online Copywriter's Handbook (2002) by Robert W. Bly, p. 19

World , Fear , Way , Idea

“The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration of wealth" are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.”

Bill Moyers (1934) American journalist

Moyers on Democracy (2008), Introduction, p. 3

Wealth

“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. There remains madness, 'the madness that one locks up', as it has aptly been described. That madness or another..”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Madness

“Man, I feel as though I'm standing on magic legs in a special effects process shot that is too unbelievable to imagine and far too costly to make a reality.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

67th Academy Award Speech (1995)

Feeling , Reality

“Imagine being killed by a bow and arrow. That would suck, an arrow killed you? They would never solve the crime. "Look at that dead guy. Let's go that way."”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

Way , Guy , Dead

“What determinate events is, beside national, dynastic and particular egoism, the instinct of domination and conquest, in one word, forceBold text. Judging by the history of humanity, harms that men have had to suffer, harms ("les maux", Fr.) that men have to suffer by their nature are minute in comparison ("en regard", Fr.) to these they inflict to each others. The most fantastic imagination might not ("ne saurait", Fr.) fabricate ("forger", Fr) some cruelties, injustices and perfidies (or perfidiousnesses) that men have not exceeded in practice.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 55.

Men , History , Nature , Suffering

“O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)

Women , Men , Bird

“Let us learn wisdom from this illustrious example. We have passed the Red Sea of slaughter; our garments are yet wet with its crimson spray. We have crossed the fearful wilderness of war, and have led our four hundred thousand heroes to sleep beside the dead enemies of the Republic. We have heard the voice of God amid the thunders of battle commanding us to wash our hands of iniquity, to 'proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.' When we spurned his counsels we were defeated, and the gulfs of ruin yawned before us. When we obeyed his voice, he gave us victory. And now at last we have reached the confines of the wilderness. Before us is the land of promise, the land of hope, the land of peace, filled with possibilities of greatness and glory too vast for the grasp of the imagination. Are we worthy to enter it? On what condition may it be ours to enjoy and transmit to our children's children? Let us pause and make deliberate and solemn preparation. Let us, as representatives of the people, whose servants we are, bear in advance the sacred ark of republican liberty, with its tables of the law inscribed with the 'irreversible guaranties' of liberty. Let us here build a monument on which shall be written not only the curses of the law against treason, disloyalty, and oppression, but also an everlasting covenant of peace and blessing with loyalty, liberty, and obedience; and all the people will say, Amen.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1866)

Wisdom , God , War , Children

“Imagine buying a toy for a child's pleasure and having him love the toy more than he loves you. Yet, isn't that what you've done with God?… Isn't it true that you have been guilty of ingratitude?… Have you ever humbly thanked God for the gift of life?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Love , Life , God , Pleasure

“That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger — the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Imaginationland," The Daily Dish (25 October 2007)

Fate

“What makes The Joker tick I wonder?” Fredric said. “I mean what are his real motivations?”
“Consider him at any level of conduct,” Bruce said slowly, “in the home, on the street, in interpersonal relations, in jail—always there is an extraordinary contradiction. He is dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and a scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and a puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, Republican and Democrat, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day—I tell you frankly, the man is a mess.”
“That’s extremely well said Bruce,” Fredric stated. “I think you’ve given a very thoughtful analysis.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“I was paraphrasing what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis,” Bruce replied.
“The Joker’s Greatest Triumph”.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964)

Women , Fools , Art , Home

“Yeah, especially this postmortem trip when people die and then everybody writes about what they felt that person is going through. It's really surprising to me that anyone can think that they have those kinds of insights or spend that much time really worrying about somebody else. I think they should spend more time trying to figure out who they are. That's my whole trip. I can't imagine anybody knowing me through my lyrics, because I don't particularly feel like I know myself. And I have more than the benefit of just lyrics to go on.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

On people thinking that they have a connection with a band or a person through their lyrics ** Interview with Request Magazine, October 1994 http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/request_10-94.shtml,
Soundgarden Era

People , Feeling , Thinking , Time