Quotes about imagination
page 13

“If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth", then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

Life, Communication, Personality

“Questions about the influence of socialism are increasingly more difficult to answer as the word socialism has so many meanings. The idea that the inequalities of incomes can be greatly reduced has come to be recognized as largely impractical. Practically all endeavours at just distribution express more or less arbitrary conceptions of what is just and the central idea of Marxian socialism of a rationalisation of the means of production has been largely abandoned as technically impracticable. I believe that in general the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

December 13, 1991, quoted in Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001) by Alan O. Ebenstein
1980s and later

Justice, Idea, Question

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Age

“I do not want to avoid immersing myself in trouble — to be a mess — to struggle out of it. I want to invent, to discover, to imagine, to speculate, to improvise — to seize the hazardous in order to be inspired. I want to experience the manifestation of the absolute — the manifestation of the unexpected in an extreme and unique relation. I know that only by following my creative instincts in an act of creative destruction will I be able to find it.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Statement of April 1950, as quoted in Hans Hofmann (1998), ed. Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey
1950s

“I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain.”

Hilary Bok (1959) American philosopher

"Now That's What I Call Toxic!," http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/02/now-thats-what-i-call-toxic.html Obsidian Wings (2009-02-27)

People, Universe

“No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; — "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Death, Truth, Soul

“It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.”

Niall Ferguson book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

People, Law, Way, Democracy

“Never dismiss ideas born of the imagination, Jack, you only get to them after much thought, much reflection and study, and considerable boldness.”

Javier Marías book Tu rostro mañana

No desdeñes nunca las ideas imaginativas, Jack, a ellas se llega sólo después de mucho pensamiento, de mucha reflexión y mucho estudio, y de notable atrevimiento.
Source: Tu rostro mañana, 2. Baile y sueño [Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 2: Dance and Dream] (2004), p. 337

Idea, Study

“Who do you think I am, girl? If you could pick all the words of the vocabulary that your mother taught you, who do you think I am? And this is only a couple hours, can you imagine what it would be like a couple days with me? I live a hundred years a day.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Source: Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IHIw9S4Vdw by Penny Daniels (1989)

Girl, Thinking

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love, Truth, Feeling, Nature

“What I have suffered you cannot imagine. But what I'm going through [circa 1878] now is even worse, much more so than when I was young.... because now I feel as if I have no future. Even so, if I had to do it again, I still think I wouldn't hesitate.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in Pissarro, His Life and Work, Shikes and Harper, Horizon Press, 1980, p. 142
1870's

Feeling, Thinking, Suffering, Future

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813). 1810s

Life, Men, Secret, Education

“Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the ‘knowledge worker’ and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world’s people to dream, to imagine, and to create.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

People, World, Dreams, Communication

“The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 145).

School, Nostalgia, Past

“The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world-mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

Secret, World, Feeling, Personality

“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end: we fancy that we have always possessed what we love, so difficult is it to imagine how we could have lived without it.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 8, ch. 2, as translated by Isabel Hill (1833)
Variant translation: It is certainly through love that eternity can be understood; it confuses all thoughts about time; it destroys the ideas of beginning and end; one thinks one has always been in love with the person one loves, so difficult is it to conceive that one could live without him.
As translated by Sylvia Raphael (1998)
Corinne (1807)

Love, Fear, Memory, Time

“Do we suppose Jesus Christ laid His blessing on this unholy poverty? Do we really imagine that this is what He had in His eye, as He pronounced the benediction? Nay! This is the Poverty which blights and curses. This is the Poverty which God hates. This is the Poverty which is an outrage on man, and an insult to God. Far from accepting it as a preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven, we have, in the name of that Kingdom, to demand that it be swept off the face of the earth and be never again seen.”

Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) British theologian

Our Neighbors (1911)

God, Hate, Christ

“If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination… The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-revenge-of-the-fallen-2009 of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (23 June 2009) Reviews, One-star reviews

Music, Hell, Revenge, Singing

“Imagine if World War II had ended with a European Nazi Empire, from the Urals to the Channel, soon armed with nuclear weapons, in mortal contest with the United States, in a peace kept only by deterrence. Imagine an evolution from a Hitler to an Albert Speer Nazi. Would the children of the Left have led songs of "All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance" beneath symbols of unilateral disarmament? Would American opposition to Nazi influence anywhere, let alone to Nazi securing of bases in the western hemisphere, have led to domestic charges of our being the imperialist world policeman? Would our intellectuals have mocked or cheered a president who used the phrase "The evil empire"? But what were the differences between that totalitarianism and the other? Deaths? Camps? The desolation of the flesh and spirit? The bodies will not be buried without an answer to that.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Death, War, Children, World

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Start of Chapter 29 (at page 237)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

Men, Hate, Game, Mathematics

“"How can a movie be "one of the best"? There's only one "best" movie, so saying something is "one of the best" is stupid and doesn't make sense. Technically any movie that's not the worst could be considered "one of the best." Imagine that, another empty phrase used by marketing people. I want to punch someone in the throat."”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Hollywood: still out of ideas? How about another black-guy-meets-white-guy comedy http://maddox.xmission.com/cop_movie.html The Best Page in the Universe

People, Stupidity, Sense

“Can a political human being, who wants to call herself a socialist, in her wildest imagination believe that Swedish social democracy could ever resist the dictatorship of the few? In that case, this person would find herself amongst fools and idiots. But this desire to see something radical amongst the social democratic leadership is the curse of the common left.”

Frank Baude (1936) Swedish politician

Frank Baude in Mot strömmen, pg 124. Translated from Swedish.

Fools, Democracy, Personality

“This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.”
Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, pp. 30–31
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Wisdom, World, Fear, Home

“He will always see the most beauty whose affections are the warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.”

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850) British politician

Review of Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, in the Edinburgh Review (May 1811)

Beauty, Exercises

“The Cobra group started new, and first of all we threw away all these things we had known and started afresh, like a child — fresh and new. Sometimes my works look very childish, or childlike, schizophrenic or stupid, you know. But that was the good thing for me. Because, for me, the material is the paint itself. The paint expresses itself. In the mass of paint, I find my imagination and go on to paint it.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quoted in: 'Karel Appel, Dutch Expressionist Painter, Dies at 85', by Margalit Fox, in 'Art & Design', New York Times May 9, 2006
Quote of an oral history in 'Contemporary Artists' - Karel Appel describes the wild artistic urgency that gave rise to the Cobra artist-group

Stupidity, Painting

“We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Part II, Chapter 7, Attractor Points, p. 151
The Death of Economics (1994)

Way, Thinking, Help

“The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

B 8
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Feeling, Light

“True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Epipsychidion (1821)

Love, Truth, Error, Understanding

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Past

“This book can be read as an argument that social democracy is not enough and we can establish something better than social democracy. The explanatory ideas of False Necessity provide an understanding of society that presents the institutional arrangements on which the social democrat relies as the relatively contingent and revisable outcome of a particular sequence of practical and imaginative conflicts. More generally, these explanatory arguments support a view of social reality within which the rejection of social democracy seems reasonable. The programmatic ideas propose an alternative to social democracy that realizes more fully the ideals that the social democrat can only imperfectly achieve and radically redefines these ideals in the course of realizing them.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 26

Books, Democracy, Idea, Understanding

“Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Age, Education, Effort, Learning

“These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

About

Men, God, World, Beauty

“Often, very often, I am alone. My studio in Amsterdam, [Beckmann lived and worked in the heart of Amsterdam during World War 2. ] an enormous old tobacco storeroom is again filled in my imagination with figures from the old days and from the new, like an ocean moved by storm and sun and always present in my thoughts. Then shapes become beings and seem comprehensible to me in the great void and uncertainty of the space which I call god.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God, War, World, Sun

“We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!”

Mario Savio (1942–1996) American activist

Speech, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley (1964-12-02).

Universe

“Balachander is my inspiration. He had a heart problem 40 years back. He has been making films for another 46 years. He can never grow old. My father used to be like that until he suffered a stroke. Then I suddenly realized he was an old man. That's also true of my brothers Chandra Haasan and to an extent Charu Haasan. I can never imagine them being old.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Aamir's choice of films makes Kamal Haasan happy

Problem, Suffering, Heart

“The violent quarrel between the abstractionists [like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, both English sculptors] and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part. And I think the first inception of a painting or a sculpture may begin from either end.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), pp. 254-255

Art, Thinking, Parting, Painting

“Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 74

Women, God, Children, Change

“Over this landscape, Göran Therborn’s Between Sex and Power rises up like some majestic volcano. Throwing up a billowing column of ideas and arguments, while a lava of evidence flows down its slopes, this is a great work of historical intellect and imagination, the effect of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigour of his discipline at its best, with command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. But it is also a set of macro-narratives that compose perhaps the first true example of a work of global history we possess.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 11. "Atlas of the Family, Göran Therborn" (2005)

Sex, History, Idea, Support

“Often it is the case that it takes ‘just a little’ to help and support people, so they can help themselves. I have met adults and children, men and women, whose living conditions are difficult for us to imagine, but every time I come away inspired by their strength and will to improve their lives and provide a better life for their children.”

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark (1972) Crown Princess of Denmark

Speech at the opening of Danida’s 50th anniversary exhibition in Bella Center; quoted on royal website http://kongehuset.dk/Menu/materiale/taler/speech-by-hrh-the-crown-princess-at-the-launch-of-danidas-50th-anniversary-exhibition-in (16 March 2012)

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 165

Time, Housing

“A word — a name —
Conjures the past before me, till it grows
More actual than the present : that — I see
But with the common eyes of daily life,
Imperfect and impatient; but the past
Out of imagination works its truth,
And grows distinct with poetry.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Subjects for Pictures
The Monthly Magazine

Life, Truth, Past

“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 no bring forth in the agitation.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Business, Madness

“A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don’t rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn’t be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 261

World, Faith, Justice, Law

“I listened while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works. He was the first of the great writers of our day whom I had thus approached on something like terms of intimacy. As we talked I observed the strange similarity between his spoken and his written words. I admired the charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of imagination, his superabundant intelligence, the liveliness of his impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

The Age for Love

Love, Pleasure, Intelligence, Passion

“I have the sh*ttest birthday—the 30th of December! Can you imagine what that was like when I was a kid in England? It was the day before New Year’s Eve. It was horrific! My sister’s birthday is on the fourth of July. It was all about strawberries and dancing in the garden in summer dresses. Mine was like, “Don’t talk about it. It’s her birthday.” It was pitch-dark (laughter). Every one wrapped presents for me that they didn’t want from Christmas. It was a terrible time to have a birthday (laughter)!”

Tracey Ullman (1959) English-born actress, comedian, singer, dancer, screenwriter, producer, director, author and businesswoman

Quoted in 2009 The Many States of Tracey Ullman https://tracey-archives.tumblr.com/post/119868522838/the-many-funny-states-of-tracey-ullman

Birthday, Sister, Laughter, Time

“When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.”

Stephen King book Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993), Introduction

World, Color, Reading, Night

“The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 571

Women

“I would like to announce my retirement from international and domestic first-class cricket. It is 16 years since I played my first Test match for India and today I feel it is an time to move on. Once I was like every other boy in India, with a dream of playing for my country. Yet I could never have imagined a journey so long and so fulfilling.”

Rahul Dravid (1973) Indian cricketer

In press conference announcing retirement from Test cricket, quoted in " After 16 yrs, Rahul Wall Dravid retires from intl cricket "in Indian Express (Indianexpress.com) http://www.indianexpress.com/news/after-16-yrs-rahul-wall-dravid-retires-from-intl-cricket/921750/0

Dreams, Feeling, Boy, Time

“Together, us gamers are strong. For too long we have been oppressed by all these groups; everyone is against us, but we are the toughest, most hard-working, most vigilant, most powerful group on the Internet! If we all together will rise up, we can defeat anything! We can take over the world! We can create the gaming utopia that we all wanted to live in! Cars are not cars - they are carmers; houses are not houses - they are gaming studios; roads are not roads - they are Candy Crush displays. Imagine it, just think of how good things would really be! Think about how bad we are now because we haven't risen up yet! The more we wait, the harder it will get, but now it is time for gamers to rise together!”

PewDiePie (1989) Swedish YouTuber and video game commentator

25 July 2018
2018, ONLY REAL GAMERS CAN WATCH THIS

World, Cars, Game, Thinking

“The abstracts are the opposite to work on. That process is more like walking, step by step, without an intention, until you discover where you are going. When I paint a landscape from a photograph or an image like this one, I can see the end point before I start, although in fact it always turns out slightly different than I imagined. What I have is not facility, because this really doesn't take skill. I have an eye. I couldn't make a drawing of you sitting here right now. I would love to have that ability, in the same way that I would love to play the piano. Virtuosity is a precondition for pianists, but in addition you have to be good. These are not the same thing.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Love, Way, Drawing, Painting

“Could you imagine if I said that “I short circuited”? They would be calling for my execution, — electric chair. They’d bring back the electric chair. It would be a whole different ball game if I said it, believe me.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)

Game

“Imagination, devotion, perseverance, together with divine grace, will assure your success.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address on the 18th anniversary of his coronation (2 November 1948)

Success, Perseverance

“Imagine a monarch, holding personal command of his army, disbanding his regiments, sacred with a hundred years of history—and handing his towns over to Anarchists and Democracy.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Reaction to the Tsar's invitation (August 1898) to the Hague Conference of 1899, quoted in Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 429-430
1890s

Democracy, History, Personality

“When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Quoted in: Paul G. Thomas (1979) Psychofeedback: practical psychocybernetics. p. 84.

“In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), Chapter 9

Life, People, Understanding, Future

“[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1998) " The Cosmos Letter http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp/letter/letter12e.html", Expo'90 Foundation, Japan

World, Nature, Sense, Appearance

“Sinitta and Jackie are my family now. I don't think of them as ex-girlfriends anymore. They are an extension of my life… It must be infuriating, but I'd never change because my ex-girlfriends are so close I couldn't imagine life without them.”

Simon Cowell (1959) English reality television judge, television producer and music executive

Quoted in mirror.co.uk interview (22 October 2005)
2000s

Life, Family, Thinking, Change

“What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally, I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals."”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us.
Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), Ch. 2: Scrubbing in Maine (p. 59)

Secret, Mood, Nature, Decision

“Tomorrow, Sunday, at 4 o'clock, visit from Picasso. As I'm expecting to see him tomorrow, my mind is at work. I'm doing this propaganda show [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1945] with him. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other. It's as if I were going to cohabit with an epileptic.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Quote of Matisse in his notebook, c. April 1945; as cited in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 6
1940s

“It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court's claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015) ; decided June 26, 2015.
2010s

Marriage, People, Law, Freedom

“It’s pretty amazing to be a part of the Star Trek family. It’s definitely a highlight of my career. I never imagined it’d lead to so many great opportunities to appear in other films, travel the world to make appearances, be featured in a comic strip, trading cards and even action figures. The fans are the most loyal, more than any franchise or brand. It’s pretty amazing how Star Trek continues to be relevant with so many TV series and films.”

Menina Fortunato (1980) Canadian actress

Enterprise's Orion Slave Girls https://www.startrek.com/article/enterprises-orion-slave-girls-part-2 (March 17, 2016)

World, Family, Travel, Star

“None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/59/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 34

Courage, Universe

“In the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid thee, that the pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bear in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination…”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII, 64

Pain

“I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi. And I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing, literally by the hour. And when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified for 11 hours. … We have captured one of the lead terrorists and he admits it was both a terrorist attack and it was influenced by the video. This was fog of war. This was complicated. The most effective, comprehensive reports and studies demonstrate that. … I deeply regret that we lost four Americans. And I of course sympathize with members of the families who are still, you know, very much grieving. And I wish that there could be an easy answer at the time, but we learned a lot, and the intelligence kept improving, and we learned enough to say what we think happened at Benghazi.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

War, People, Family, Feeling

“If I'm playing the crgiostvnptttttttttttttttttt[ peacemaker, you can imagine what was going on out there.”

Virat Kohli (1988) Indian cricket player

Kohli on the conflicts during the Adelaide Test vfdigjvdigjgddvgjpiejscdpg, ,g,vg ,, gdt,,j dtgjgainst Australia during India v/s Australia 4 match test series in 2011-12, quoted on Maketimeforsports, "Virat Kohli: What he said, really meant and definitely didn’t" http://maketimeforsports.com/2014/12/15/virat-kohli-what-he-said-really-meant-and-definitely-didnt-3/, December 15, 2014.

“I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 22: quote in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, 1900

Spring, Nature, Painting

“Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

Les jeunes filles se créent souvent de nobles, de ravissantes images, des figures tout idéales, et se forgent des idées chimériques sur les hommes, sur les sentiments, sur le monde; puis elles attribuent innocemment à un caractère les perfections qu'elles ont rêvées, et s'y confient.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. I: Early Mistakes.

Life, Men, Girl, Idea

“The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Patches of Sunlight

Lie, Beauty, Memory, Waiting

“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.”

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

Beauty
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Beauty

“These are the faces of children I embraced and kissed and loved. I cannot imagine that they are dead, that none would survive… A million and a half children among the six million… But this I knew… I wanted to save their faces, not their ashes.”

Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) American photographer

Mitgang, Herbert (Oct. 2, 1983). Testament to a Lost People. New York Times Magazine. pg 47.

Love, Children, Kiss, Dead

“It is soft, smooth and shining—like intelligence. Its edges seem sharp but do not cut—like justice. It hangs down to the ground—like humility. When struck, it gives a clear, ringing sound—like music. The strains in it are not hidden and add to its beauty—like truthfulness.’ What imagination!”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Confucius extolled Jade's virtues this way. Cited in Awake! magazine 1987, 9/22.
Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Truth, Justice, Beauty, Music

“I have seen here [in London] a play on Faust, the most diabolic thing imaginable. The Mephistopheles is a masterpiece of caricature and intelligence. It is Goethe's 'Faust', but adapted; the principle features are preserved. They have made it into an opera mixed with comedy and with everything that is most sombre. The scene in the church is given with the priest's chanting and the organ in the distance. Impossible to carry an effect further, in the theater.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in a letter (written in London, England) to J. B. Pierret, 18 June 1825; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 67
1815 - 1830

Intelligence

“[I call for] imagination and courage in the endless endeavor to make human life more meaningful and significant, more nearly expressive of the values we cherish… A national policy for the family will earn affirmation and as such should give re-direction to what we are now doing in our social life, and new hope and inspiration to individual men and women and new promise to youth.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Cited in: Ruth H. Jewson, James Walters (1988) The National Council on Family Relations: a fifty year history. p. 15
National Policy for the Family (1948)

Life, Women, Men, Youth

“I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist's palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 326-327
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Way, Feeling, Optimism, Passion

“Locked in a struggle for the right combination
Of words in a melody line,
I took a walk along the riverbank of my imagination.
Golden clouds were shuffling the sunshine.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Everything About It Is a Love Song
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

“If you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant." And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement. And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar!”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Arlo has repeatedly updated this part through the years to help it match modern life more. He has updated to say that if only one person does it, they say the person in question is a certain amount of years too late. He also referenced the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy during the 40th anniversary recording. He has also started adding the phrase, "And most of them would be too young to know what a movement was." once he says, "Friends they may think it's a movement."
Alice's Restaurant Massacree

People, Thinking, Singing, Time

“An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Contradiction (1947), p. 240

Perfection

“God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

God, Happiness, Religion, Idea

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

People, World, Peace, Food

“The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.”

Al Alvarez (1929–2019) English poet, novelist, essayist and critic

Page 262.
The Savage God (1971)

Life, Death, Art, Parting

“I think everyone has what it takes to be a good actor innately within them. It’s really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person. You can’t become another person if you’re not self-aware; you wouldn’t know what’s changed. [But] the ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it. On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others—I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it’s not quite as specific like that. I’m sure there’s a range, but I think everyone can pretend.”

Bryce Dallas Howard (1981) American actress

Bryce Dallas Howard https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/bryce-dallas-howard (February 10, 2017)

People, Behavior, Thinking, Change

“The devil gave me a look which made me profoundly uneasy. 'Just because I am enjoying your sympathy, don't imagine that I cannot read you like a book,' he said. 'You think you are cleverer than I; it is a very common academic delusion.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

When Satan Goes Home For Christmas
High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories (1982)

Books, Thinking, Reading

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.... is related in the principle to an invisible world.... when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly... I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.... related to the whole idea of reality.... the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality..”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote from 'A. Beuys in the wilderness', 1974 (lecture at the Ulster Museum); as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 198
1970's

Secret, World, Art, Idea

“[wrote_the_exam]What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? […] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. […] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Nerdist podcast, Episode #489 http://www.nerdist.com/2014/03/nerdist-podcast-neil-degrasse-tyson-returns-again/ (2014-04) 2010s

Life, Stupidity, Intelligence, Thinking

“Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Religion, Dreams, Reality

“The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Faith for Living (1940)

Love, Communication, Wealth

“After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”
She smiled faintly. “Yes.”
“I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.””

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

Part 2, Chapter 2 (p. 264)
Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Life, Death, Smile, Girl

“It pains me deeply, or more deeply than any of you can imagine, to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm. All the sacrifice, all the long hours of preparation were to help, not to hurt. But what hurts more, much more, is the amount of time and attention spent on manufactured controversies and media sideshows when so many problems cry out for constructive attention.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Pain, Problem, Time, Help

“I'm surprised she's friends with the Tories, Helen Bonham-Carter, because she's an artist and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, artists do tend, historically, to be on the left. People on the right tend to be practical, level-headed, capable, unsentimental realists; people on the left tend to be people with dreams, hope, vision, imagination. You have to have imagination on the left, don't you? You have to be able to look at Ed Miliband and imagine that he represents anything other than the death of the post-war socialist dream. Ed Miliband, how did he manage that; how did he make the Labour party less popular than under Blair? That's like catching a baby that's been thrown out of an aeroplane and then tripping up and dropping it in a gutter.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 3 Episode 3: "Satire"

Death, War, People, Dreams

“Yes, I think I am a realist. Because I make what I see. It's only the problem of seeing it. If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space - then you can make it, and tout de suite you're a realist. The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

Question, Léger once called you a realist. How do you feel about this?
1950s - 1960s, interview with Alexander Calder', (1962)

Problem, Thinking, Universe

“People who had, in the past, suffered from technophobia suffered even more. Others took other positions. Things were not so bad. Things could be worse. Worse things could be imagined. Worse things had been endured and triumphed over, in the past. This was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.”

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

“A Nation of Wheels”, p. 131.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

People, Suffering, Past

“In 1946 it was the first time I saw a Van Gogh, a painting from his years in France. It was excactly what I had always felt here [in the fields of Friesland]: infinity, the unimaginable. I was bewildered and thought: who has been painting here for God's sake? Pink stripes in a green sky, you can't imagine! Ultramarine and carmine in the soil with a big yellow sun behind it..”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: In 1946 zag ik voor het eerst een Van Gogh, uit z'n Franse tijd. Dàt was wat ik hier [in Friesland] altijd gevoeld had: de oneindigheid, het onvoorstelbare. Ik was verbouwereerd, [en] dacht: wie is hier in godsnaam bezig geweest? Roze strepen in een groene lucht, moet je es nagaan. Ultramarijn en karmijn in de bodem, een grote gele zon erachter..
Mens & Gevoelens: Jopie Huisman', 1993

God, Time, Sun, Painting

“Many mystics have said, and it is true, that anything you see is not God. Anything you think is not God, neither are visions, lights, moving objects or anything else. Any sensation or feeling is not God. They are all the products of the creation or your imagination.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

God, Feeling, Thinking, Light

“Literature is full of examples of remarkable cures through the influence of the imagination, which is only an active phase of faith.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

The Faith that Heals (1910)

Faith, Literature

“The series of events leading up to the formation of the biblical community and its religion apparently began unexpectedly. Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating one of the slaves. It is difficult to imagine this being a fictional invention, especially since the biblical writers never chose to comment on this noteworthy aspect of the protagonist’s dark past. When Moses later tried to intervene between two quarreling slaves, one of them responded, “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:11-15). Is the monopoly of force — the ability to coerce other human beings — truly the ultimate basis of social authority? If it seems undesirable to ground social authority on something that essentially boils down to the superior ability to commit murder, then what is the alternative?”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Ancient Israel’s Faith and History: An Introduction the Bible in Context (2001)

Religion, Communication, Past

“The imagination of these conquered peoples was dazzled by the introduction of Greek art, literature, philosophy, and public works. Though the successors of Alexander were unable to maintain the political control of the lands he conquered, and though successive waves of Roman, Arabian, and Tartar conquests swept over these lands in succeeding centuries, none of the later conquerors has been able wholly to eradicate the influence of Greek culture, nor to exterminate that element of population which was of Greek blood.”

Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (1856–1946) American diplomat

I was sent to Athens http://www.hri.org/docs/Morgenthau/

People, Art, Literature, Success

“To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Across the Plains

Source: Across the Plains (1892), Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

Men, Secret, Idea

“Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,
And always blind, and often tipsy;
Sometimes for years and years together,
She ’ll bless you with the sunniest weather,
Bestowing honour, pudding, pence,
You can’t imagine why or whence;—
Then in a moment—Presto, pass!—
Your joys are withered like the grass;”

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839) British politician, poet

The haunted Tree.

Grass, Joy, Weather

“As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

note in Berthe's Journal, Jan. 1886; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 262-263
Berthe visited Degas in his studio
1881 - 1895

Way, Thinking, Study, Drawing

Quotes about imagination page 13

Quotes about imagination
page 13