Quotes about imagination
page 19

“Blade grumbled about the absurdities of the theological imagination and why didn’t people have sense enough to smother would-be priests in their cradles?”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 10 (p. 261)

People, Sense

“In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism

Way, Feeling, Nature, Reality

“This is a proposal for a show, in which I imagine a Newly Born Limb, the Ghost of A Flea, and an Endless Note Petrified in Stone. I picture two prosthetic arms, one ancient, one modern, reaching out as far as they can, to grasp all that there is in the world.”

Mark Leckey (1964) British artist

"Prop4aShw" (2013)

World

“A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love, Death, Women, Suffering

“Brexit was a chilling example of how truly intolerant and despicable the left in this country are. I know people whose own parents almost disowned them because they voted leave. I have probably received in the region of 300 death threats – mainly from Muslims who want to prove Islam is a “religion of peace” by killing me, as well as Black Lives Matter supporters. I now really enjoy the death threats because I post them all on social media and they allow me to illustrate how we are stupidly shaping society to cater for the most aggressive, hateful, bigots imaginable. The left denounces people like me as bigots for standing up for true liberal principles which made Western civilisation great in the first place.”

Paul Joseph Watson (1982) English YouTuber, radio host, writer, editor, and conspiracy theorist

"An interview with Paul Joseph Watson", The Tab (7 November 2016)

Death, Hate, People, Peace

“One of these days I'll make a few casual remarks about Winston [Churchill]. Not a speech—no oratory—just a few words in passing. I've got it all ready. I am going to say that when Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said "No one person has a right to so many gifts", picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (22 May 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 204.
1936

Wisdom, Housing, Personality

“Since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the distribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. The conception, originally introduced by Hering and independently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon and has been received with some approval, especially by F. Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and structural change, a process frankly inconceivable.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 190

Life, Food, Way, Idea

“Look at why Jesus strictly avoided speaking the language of the theologians of his day. It’s plain to see what an enormous liberation there lies in hearing something about God in the words of poetry. Imagine that we would speak about God in the music of Mozart and Beethoven or in the pictures of van Gogh… It would be impossible to fight wars over the true faith in the Name of Mozart or van Gogh… The language of poetry, the parables of Jesus, is international. You can’t and mustn’t pour them into dogmas.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

"Heil und Heilung - Theologie und Psychoanalyse," speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland (1977-05-21)

God, War, Faith, Music

“You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

People, Science, Sea

“In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug… that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Food, Game

“I imagine there will be great interest made for the eastern troops to be posted on the east side of the North River, to favor their recruiting. These reasons have something plausible in them, but I have my doubts with respect to their truth and reality. Men, when they are near home, are much more influenced by domestic attachments than they are when they are at a great distance. The friends and relations of the soldiers very seldom use their influence to engage them in the service. On the contrary, they commonly make use of every argument to dissuade them from it. I am of opinion, therefore, the further the troops are removed from home, the more favorable it will be to the recruiting service in camp.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (November 1779)

Men, Truth, Home, Reality

“If you're involved with imagination and the creative process, it's not such a difficult thing to believe in a God. But I'm not involved in any religions, and I've never intended to make religious records or records that preach some kind of point of view.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

"Interview with Nick Cave" http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/nick-cave_0308.htm, musicOMH (March, 2008) God and religion

God, Religion

“This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding — can participate in the constituting of reality — only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 7 : Passion for Form, p. 134

Life, World, Way, Understanding

“Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things – enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which.”

Barbara Pym (1913–1980) British writer

Jane and Prudence (1953), chapter 7

Love, Women, Men, Feeling

“Space is as infinite as we can imagine, and expanding this perspective is what adjusts humankind’s focus on conquering our true enemies, the formidable foes: ignorance and limitation.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Impact of Space Activities Upon Society (ESA Br) European Space Agency (2005)

“I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time, keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

On playing the Man With No Name character
Source: Clint: The Life and Legend (1999), p. 133.

Feeling, Time, Past

“And we saw the seed,
The minuscule Sequoia seed
In the museum by the tremendous slab
Of the tree. And imagined the seed
In soil and the growth quickened
So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing
Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green
Needles of a redwood until the tree
Stood in the room without soil—
How much of the earth's
Crust has lived
The seed’s violence!
The shock is metaphysical.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

"Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Tree

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others.”

Alfred M. Mayer (1836–1897) American physicist

Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ

Science, Success, Parting

“Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. …it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most nonscientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. …by the time science becomes a closed—that is, computerizable—project, it is not science anymore. It is not in the area of the exploration of errors.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

Age, Error, Feeling, Science

“In education poetry is invaluable; the study of it cultivates the memory, the imagination, and the heart.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

On poetry

Education, Study, Memory, Heart

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Question, Problem, Suffering, Teachers

“Truly, night was made for sleep; since to its wakeful hours belongs an oppression unknown to the very dreariest hours of day. The stillness is so deep, the solitude so unbroken, the fever brought on by want of rest so weakens the nerves, that the imagination exercises despotic and unwholesome power, till, if the heart have a fear or a sorrow, up it arises in all the force and terror of gigantic exaggeration.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Fear, Exercises, Solitude, Sleep

“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

Life, World, Way, Tree

“I’ve always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss.”

David Gerrold book The Man Who Folded Himself

in the Afterword, p. 117
The Man Who Folded Himself (1973)

Life

“Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

New York Times, letter to the editor (26 August 2009)

God, Science

“Not to go on for ever repeating what man has already done is our work, but to arrive at new realisations and undreamed-of masteries. Time and soul and world are given us for our field, vision and hope and creative imagination stand for our prompters, will and thought and labour are our all-effective instruments.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

World, Hope, Soul, Time

“My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, Idea, Nature, Knowledge

“Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how to invent invention.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Source: The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1795–1822), Ch. IV.

Age, Time

“There is more in a common bubble than those who have only played with them generally imagine.”

C. V. Boys (1855–1944) British physicist

[Charles Vernon Boys, Soap-bubbles and the forces which mould them: Being a course of three lectures delivered in the theatre of the London institution on the afternoons of Dec. 30, 1889, Jan. 1 and 3, 1890, before a juvenile audience, Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1896, 10]

“How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
1831 - 1863

Beauty, Way, Appearance

“Firstly, I must of necessity express some obvious qualifications about my remarks. Foremost, I can never fully imagine, much less experience, the issues faced by any woman. I was born male in an advanced Western nation, to comfortably well off parents. I have never routinely experienced discrimination in my career, nor the apprehension of violence in my personal life. Far too many women regardless of nationality, religion, or class status have known both. Most benefits of masculinity and patriarchy have accrued to me. Nonetheless, I hope those considerable limitations in my perspective can in part be offset by my sincere intent to support women in my organisation to thrive in the absence of both.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Life, Women, Religion, Hope

“Imagine you go away
On a business trip one day
And when you come back home
Your children have grown
And you never made your wife moan”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Ghost Of Corporate Future
Soviet Kitsch (2004)

Children, Home, Business

“Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite?... But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more... my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love. But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Love, Hate, Age, Past

“When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his fingerends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted— as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

World, Soul, Mountain, Mood

“I can't imagine working without an audience.”

Bea Arthur (1922–2009) actress, singer, comedian

Interview, The New York Times, December 6, 2000

“To disgust men with their work is a serious blunder on the part of human society; what could be more natural than their liking for what they do? Work keeps off boredom, vice, and poverty. It is the remedy for all imagined evils. "The souls' joy lies in doing," said Shelly. Active work saves man from himself; indolence make shim a prey to useless regrets, dangerous reveries, enviousness, and hate. Also the first rule of the art of governing is, at all costs, to keep a nation at work. A bored nation is impossible to govern, but a nation occupied by work which it believes to be useful and accomplishes on its own initiative is already a happy one.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Men, Hate, Happiness, Art

“Western psychologists accuse religion of repressing the vital energy of man and rendering his life quite miserable as a result of the sense of guilt which especially obsesses the religious people and makes them imagine that all their actions are sinful and can only be expiated through abstention from enjoying the pleasures of life. Those psychologists add that Europe lived in the darkness of ignorance as long as it adhered to its religion but once it freed itself from the fetters of religion, its emotions were liberated and accordingly it achieved wonders in the field of production.”

Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014) Egyptian Islamist writer and scholar

Source: Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, Chapter 11, Islam and Sexual Repression, p. 207.

Life, People, Pleasure, Religion

“The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered from a sufficiently general point of view. We have considered it only in machines… [for which] the phenomenon is… incomplete. It becomes difficult to recognize its principles and study its laws. …[T]he principle of the production of motion by heat… must be considered independently of any mechanism or… particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam-engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Law, Study

“We live in anti-liberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can't even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have traveled from the Age of Reason to our own times.”

Lew Rockwell (1944) American libertarian author and editor

As quoted in "The Freedom of Association" http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/freedom-of-association145.html (1 June 2010). 2010s

Age, Travel, Idea, Freedom

“By the time they first encounter porn, most men have internalized the sexist ideology of our culture, and porn, rather than being an aberration, actually cements and consolidates their ideas about sexuality. And it does this in a way that gives them intense sexual pleasure. This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable. Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence.”

Gail Dines (1958) anti-pornography campaigner

Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines

Women, Men, Pleasure, Sex

“Compassion takes imagination.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview on ABC Chicago (3 May 2011) http://abclocal.go.com/wls/video?id=8109463/

“To occupy my imagination, which has been depressed by dwelling on my misfortunes, and to compensate at least in part for some of the considerable expenses I have incurred, I set myself to painting a series of cabinet pictures.... they depict themes that cannot usually be dealt with in commissioned works, where 'capricho' [whim] and invention do not have much of a role to play. I thought of sending them to the academy..”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to his friend Bernardo de Iriarte, deputy of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Jan. 1794; as quoted in 'Goya and Iriarte', in Goya his Life and Work, P. Gassier and J. Wilson, 1971, p. 382
cabinet paintings were small portable paintings, which did not need a lot of wall-space and could be moved around at the owner's whim. Goya's famous series 'Caprichos' really begin after physical and probably mental breakdown in 1792. He was 46, and thereafter deaf until his death in 1828
1790s

Parting, Painting

“To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it — and this is what almost all historians have believed — is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. …[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?

People, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

15 March 1834
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Age, Nature, Effort, Strong

“I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake.
The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!”

Carole Morin British writer

Trivial and Profound (2013)

Books, Time, Reading, Housing

“But do you know that every day there are people that are literally leaving their children at the doors of the Greek Orthodox Church, with notes around their necks saying, ‘We cannot afford to feed or look after these children, please take them from us.’ Can you imagine that?”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Segment from an article on the UKIP website, 31 May 2012. On the edge of social breakdown http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2681-on-the-edge-of-social-breakdown 2012

Children, People

“But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps... Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor..”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

1910 - 1935, The mysteries of the forest' (1934)

Dreams, Past, Perfection

“I’m motivated every single day to go to the rink because of what she brings. I know that she brings her best every day. With brilliant people, with being so creative, it’s hard to imagine you’d just be so steady. That last thing, that’s the consistency.”

Scott Moir (1987) Canadian figure skater

Scott Moir, Interview with Kristina Rutherford for Sportsnet.ca (January 2018)
Partnership with Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir about Virtue

People, Motivation

“I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Malala in Interview with a Pakistani Television network, 2011-12; Cited in: The girl who wanted to go to school http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/the-girl-who-wanted-to-go-to-school.html." The New Yorker by Basharat Peer, posted October 10, 2012 2010 -

Education, Thinking

“The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Home, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“As we all know, the singularity in the art of Bach is the fusion of both levels and lines, the horizontal and vertical line. It’s a real wonder to see that the creation and forming of the horizontal line, the polyphonic structure, also results in this perfect, beautiful vertical line, the harmonic line. As we also know, Bach already used the full harmonic range and radius as no composer before him. My artistic aim of course is to point out the horizontal line in soloistic manner in a dynamically elastic way, but in the same breath to form the harmonic line in a bright field of color (I would call it “harmonic articulation”), to achieve a particular atmosphere of emotions and moods, drama, velocity, vividness, and so on. As we can imagine, these are high demands …”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Beauty, Art, Color, Way

“I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a disturbance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 134

Art, Personality

“To the degree that a man possesses a vivid ideal of the good life, submerges himself in the sea of human misery and endeavors to alleviate suffering, kindles imagination in hours of silence and by visions of beauty, and follows the noblest personality into the presence of a loving, suffering Father—to the extent that he lives meaningfully, he will be convinced of sin and cry aloud for deliverance.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

"Penitence and Social Progress" World Tomorrow 15 (May, 1932)

Love, Life, Beauty, Silence

“Today, in the public imagination, “ethnic-cleansing” has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so). But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

War, Understanding, Success

“I could never really make the connection between Christian and Catholic. I always imagined that Christ would look down upon the Catholic church and totally disassociate himself from it. I went to severe schools, working class schools, where they would almost chop your fingers off for your own good, and if you missed church on Sunday and went to school on a Monday and they quizzed you on it, you'd be sent to the gallows. It was like 'Brush you teeth NOW or you will DIE IN HELL and you will ROT and all these SNAKES will EAT you'. And I remember all these religious figures, statues, which used to petrify every living child. All these snakes trodden underfoot and blood everywhere. I thought it was so morbid. I mean the very idea of just going to church anyway is really quite absurd. I always felt that it was really like the police, certainly in this country at any rate, just there to keep the working classes humble and in their place. Because of course nobody else but the working class pays any attention to it. I really feel quite sick when I see the Pope giving long, overblown, inflated lectures on nuclear weapons and then having tea with Margaret Thatcher. To me it's total hypocrisy. And when I hear the Pope completely condemning working class women for having abortions and condemning nobody else… to me the whole thing is entirely class ridden, it's just really to keep the working classes in perpetual fear and feeling total guilt.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

from "All men have secrets and these are Morrissey’s", interview by Neil McCormick,Hot Press (4 May 1984)
In interviews etc., About life and death

Women, Fear, School, Feeling

“I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible.”

Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) American playwright

Wendy Wasserstein (1991) The Heidi chronicles and other plays, p. 60

Lie

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section II, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part VI

Happiness, Beauty, Game, Strong

“In short, to remember is to reconstruct in part on the basis of what we have learned or said since. That's normal, that's how we remember. I tell you this to encourage you to reactivate some of these profiles of excitation, instead of simply digging obsessively in an effort to find something that's already there, as shiny and new as you imagine it was when you first set it aside … Remembering is a labor, not a luxury.”

Umberto Eco book The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

Effort, Learning, Parting

“Progressives find it hard to imagine that there are others who in good faith don’t want the better world they’re offering and will fiercely resist it.”

George Packer (1960) American journalist and writer

' Witnessing the Obama Presidency, from Start to Finish https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/witnessing-the-obama-presidency-from-start-to-finish' by George Packer, The New Yorker, June 18, 2018.

World, Faith

“It's not like I let people do things for me, so I guess you can call me a control freak, or you can call me passionate… I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination.”

Courteney Cox (1964) television and film actress from the United States

As quoted in "A revealing sit-down with Courteney Cox" in USA Today (10 September 2003) http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/2003-10-08-cox_x.htm

People, Passion, Personality

“I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities;; and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from 'The History of Landscape Painting,' first lecture, Royal Institution (26 May 1836), from notes taken by C.R. Leslie
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

World, Hope, History, Reality

“We have a word game in English called "Twenty questions." To play Twenty Questions, one player imagines some object, and the other players must guess what it is by asking questions that can be answered with a "yes" or a "no." I imagine every language has a similar game, and, for those of us who speak the language of science, the game is called The Scientific Method.”

K. Barry Sharpless (1941) American chemist

Nobel Banquet speech, 2001

Game, Question, Science

“If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 117

“If I propose something distant, you may sayː interesting, but utopian. If I propose something close, you may answerː feasible but trivial. In contemporary efforts to think and talk programmatically, all proposals are made to seem either utopian or trivial. We have lost confidence in our ability to imagine structural change in society, and fall back upon a surrogate standardː a proposal is realistic if it approaches what already exists. It is easy to be a realist if you accept everything.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 29

Confidence, Thinking, Effort, Distant

“To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists — the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images — poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 22

“An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God, Learning

“You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

Quoted by Bob January http://bobjanuary.com/waltz.htm

Men, Appearance

“Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

Remark at the International PEN Club conference, Sept 11-13 1941, reproduced in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer

“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. There will come with the greater love of science greater love to one another. Living more nearly to Nature is living farther from the world and from its follies, but nearer to the world's people; it is to be of them, with them, and for them, and especially for their improvement. We cannot see how impartially Nature gives of her riches to all, without loving all, and helping all; and if we cannot learn through Nature's laws the certainty of spiritual truths, we can at least learn to promote spiritual growth while we are together, and live in a trusting hope of a greater growth in the future.”

Maria Mitchell (1818–1889) American astronomer

Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (illustrated) by Maria Mitchell, 1896, p. 186.

Love, People, Truth, World

“Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Page 16.
Backlash (1992)

Women, Appearance

“The idea that the worldling's 'reality' is illusion and that life itself is a dream from which we shall eventually awake is of course a Buddhist one; but in Xueqin's hands it becomes a poetical means of demonstrating that his characters are both creatures of his imagination and at the same time the real companions of his golden youth. To that extent it can be thought of as a literary device rather than as a deeply held philosophy, though it is really both.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

Source: Preface to The Golden Days, 1973, p. 45

Life, Youth, Dreams, Idea

“Nothing is more certain than that war promotes science and increases comforts. Utopia may mean no more wars, but universal peace and plenty will never reign until at least one more war raises mankind to a plane of such comfort and ease that nobody on either side of a frontier can even imagine the possibility of resorting to arms. Comfort creates wars and comfort may someday end them.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

War, Peace, Universe, Science

“No it's one of them things though, imagine it.. if you're that caretaker and you're thinkin I've got away with this then suddenly a plant grasses you up.. you weren't expectin that.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast - Bonus Hour
On Nature

Grass

“WOODSTOCK NATION is built on ELECTRICITY. It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality. I hesitate only in using the word Morality, for Morality means soul and ELECTRICITY lack soul but so too does the wood pen I scratch against the yellow pad. Morality rests in God's imagination and if we see ourselves as gods I guess we alone make those choices. Moral decisions never rest in our tools, be they electricity or pencils, flowers, or guns.”

Abbie Hoffman book Woodstock Nation

Woodstock Nation (1969)

God, School, Religion, Music

“No doubt analytical psychologists could tear it all to bits and explain it in the jargon of this or that psychological school. Critics could trample on my dreams and say that it was too much in the realm of feeling to have any value, but so is falling in love. Is that not real, and highly significant, and life-changing? So is the state of mind induced by music, or by some of the glories of Nature, or by some of the works of man... All I can say is that to me it was an experience of God, never to be denied... No one who has had such an experience can ever doubt but that in the end good will triumph over every form of evil, and that every life, however humble, frustrated, indifferent or even careless, is in the care of this Power and within a Plan, vast beyond our power to imagine, which will work out in a blessedness which brings utter satisfaction and quality of bliss for which there are no words.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

(76-77) [ellipsis added]
The Christian Agnostic (1965)

Love, Life, God, School

“How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.”

Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 70

People, World

“For me Greece is Maria Farantouri. This is how I imagined Goddess Hera to be: strong, pure and vigilant. I have never encountered any other artist able to give me such a strong sense of the divine.”

François Mitterrand (1916–1996) 21st President of the French Republic

L’Abeille et l’architecte [The Bee and the Architect] (1980)

Sense, Strong

““You see, Ebenezer, charity begs a crucial question. How did the bestower attain the position from which he now exercises his largesse?” My dead colleague cleaned his teeth with one of his many appended keys. “Through imagination and merit? Or through inherited privilege and ruthless exploitation?””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge" p. 158 (originally published in Spirits of Christmas: Twenty Otherworldly Tales, edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Exercises, Question, Dead

“In the Seventies, people discussed the first two paradigms and tried to imagine what the next one would be like. Generally, they agreed that the new paradigm would be neither matriarchal nor patriarchal; it would be androgynous. Rather than tribal or hierachial, the structures of such a society would be ecological.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Dancing in the Flames (1997), p. 207

People

“I think reading is an effective way of introspecting how you perceive reality and imagination. As an author, you get to know what other authors have done better and it helps hone skills.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

World Book Day (2018)

Way, Thinking, Reality, Reading

“Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 7, “Seeking New Laws,” p. 162: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2NnquxdWFk&t=29m20s

Nature

“I figure that, given our “thrownness,” as Heidegger called it, we should work hard to become as bewildered as possible by this strange state of affairs, asking the most impertinent and audacious questions we can imagine. To do otherwise—and instead hand over the mystery of it all to dubious cults of expertise—is to waste one’s life, I feel.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 14)

Life, Feeling, Question

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.
Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us."
And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

Women, God, Children, People

“Six-year-old girls in a place like Hyderabad did not play; tennis was a recreation like badminton or gardening. So I draw inspiration from my parents. Steffi Graf has always been my tennis idol; always Steffi Graf. Just the way she was and the way she carried herself on the court and off the court. She does inspire me today. Everyone asks me "Who is your favorite tennis player?" And I always say "Steffi Graf." I just cannot imagine anyone being better than her, you know? I think a lot of people love Steffi Graf for the way she was on and off the court.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Tennis Week "The Tennis Week Interview: Sania Mirza"

Love, People, Way, Girl

“In contrast to Smith’s incomplete modeling, his follower, David Ricardo, provides a coherent setting— basically, the first macroeconomic model—that can be tested, modified, and applied. Although Ricardo is surely narrower and less imaginative and insightful than Smith, he is also a lot better organized. That is why Ricardo’s analysis of macroeconomics—for example, of the implications of public debt—is more coherent and useful than Smith’s.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. 10

“She put snow on the mountain's / peak for me and took the Gallup Poll of my imagination. / She is both the V-Hold and popular fiction of my life. I write / her letters daily, which I'm then prompted to discard. She / engineered several corporate mergers until I couldn't resist / temptation.”

Carson Cistulli (1979) American poet and writer

A Century of Enthusiasm (2007)

Life, Mountain

“I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Quoted in "There is nothing like a dame: Dame Rebecca West at ninety," Vogue (February 1983)

Death, People, Fear, Dead

“That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter X
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Time, Heart, Personality

“Let us imagine that the aboriginal-original human specimen was one of two brother apes, A and B; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened to B; he became the first time-binder, a human. … He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother "A"; he observed "A is my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore, I AM AN ANIMAL." This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. … He [then] said to himself, "If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thing supernatural."”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Source: Manhood of Humanity (1921), p. 67. Chapter: What is Man?

Time, Animals, Falseness

“Whatever happens to me from now on, I can't ever imagine wanting to distance myself from The X Factor, or having a bad word to say about it, because the show opened doors for me that had never opened before.”

Leona Lewis (1985) British singer-songwriter

Daily Mail, October 2007

“The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The God of Dark Laughter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)

Evil

“”Jewish Peril” exposed.
Historic “Fake.”
Details of the forgery.
More parallels.
We published yesterday an article from our Constantinople Correspondent, which showed that the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – one of the mysteries of politics since 1905 – were a clumsy forgery, the text being based on a book published in French in 1865. The book, without title page, was obtained by our correspondent from a Russian source, and we were able to identify it with a complete copy in the British Museum.
The disclosure, which naturally aroused the greatest interest among those familiar with Jewish questions, finally disposes of the “Protocols” as credible evidence of a Jewish plot against civilization.
We publish below a second article, which gives further close parallels between the language of the Protocols and that attributed to Machiavelli and Montesquieu in the volume dated from Geneva.
Plagiarism at Work.
(From our Constantinople Correspondent.)
While the Geneva Dialogue open with an exchange of compliments between Monsequieu and Machiavelli, which covers seven pages, the author of the Protocols plunges at once in medias res.
One can imagine him hastily turning over those first seven pages of the book which he has been ordered to paraphrase against time, and angrily ejaculating, “Nothing here.” But on page 8 of the Dialogues he finds what he wants.
Publisher: Good work Graves…we finally paid your émigré £ 300 for it…now if we can find Golovinski and get his confession…
Graves: He joined the Bolsheviks.
Golovinski became a party ‘’’activist’’’ and rose to be an adviser to Trotsky. But he ‘’’died’’’ last year!
Publisher: Well, that’s that!
Publisher: Oh but Graves, “The Times” is influential… after our expose we’ll probably hear no more of this fraud!
Graves: I’m not sure!
Anti-Bolsheviks, White Russians, published thousands of copies! Here’s a page from Nilus’ “The Great in the Small.”
Publisher: Astonishing…mystical symbols…eh?
The “Protocols” quickly began to circulate around the world.
A French edition this year…and in America Henry Ford, the auto magnate, has been serializing it in his paper, the “Dearborn independent”!
Publisher: When did it first appear in Europe?
Graves: The German edition…dated 1919, was the first!
This is an evil book…a fake designed to malign a whole group of people.
Publisher: I know, I know! …Ugly stuff, Graves.
Graves: Well, what are we to do about it?
Publisher: Your report exposed it as a foul fraud!
Publisher: Y’forget the power of the press, graves! “The Times” has tremendous worldwide influence.
This fraud will soon be well known everywhere…so, my boy, ‘’’what harm can the “protocols” possibly do now?”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 91-94

People, Books, World, Boy

“The imagination is the eye of the soul.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Soul

“Imagine a universe made up not of things in space and in time, but of patterned flows extending throughout its reaches. What flows is a mysterious, nonindividualized something we call energy. It flows along pathways structured by the metric of integral space-time. It flows smoothly, without crinks or wrinkles, over vast stretches of this cosmic matrix, and it becomes contorted in some regions.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 80.

Universe, Time

“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds, as is stated on good authority, have vivid dreams, and this is shewn by their movements and voice, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. … Few persons any longer dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve. It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", page 46 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=59&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Dogs, Dreams, Cats, Bird

“If I dared, I should say that your [ Camille Pissarro ] letter is imprinted with sadness. The picture business isn't going well; I fear that your morale may be colored a little grey, but I'm sure that it's only a passing phase… I imagine that you would be delighted with the country where I am now…. in ', who had talked to me about it. It's like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea. If the weather turns favorable perhaps I'll be able to finish them off.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cezanne's letter to Camille Pissarro, from L'Estaque 2 July 1876, taken from Alex Danchev, The Letters of Paul Cézanne, 2013; as quoted in the 'Daily Beast' online, 13 Oct. 2013 https://www.thedailybeast.com/cezannes-letter-to-pissarro-picture-business-isnt-going-well Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

Sadness, Fear, Color, Business

“Everything that used to be foreign to me, at the rational procedures in my profession, I now beging to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment. Apparently I am becoming perfectly sober and small, perfectly unpoetic and unenthusiastic. I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1902), # 425, in The Diaries of Paul Klee - 1898-1918, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1968
1895 - 1902

“There are those whose purpose in writing is, by means of the noble qualities of heart which their imagination invents or which they themselves may have, to seek the plaudits of other human beings. For my part, I use my genius to depict the delights of cruelty: delights which are not transitory or artificial; but which began with man and will end with him. Cannot genius be allied with cruelty in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or can one, being cruel, not have genius?”

Comte de Lautréamont book Les Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror

Secret, Heart, Parting

“Amongst the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages, there have been struggles between the males during many generations for the possession of the females. But mere bodily strength and size would do little for victory, unless associated with courage, perseverance, and determined energy. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female, and the older males have to retain their females by renewed battles. They have, also, in the case of mankind, to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during this same period of life. Consequently, in accordance with the principle often alluded to, we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 564 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=587&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Life, Fashion, Courage, Success

Quotes about imagination page 19

Quotes about imagination
page 19