Quotes about imagination (3968 quotes, page 2)

“Being in a material body means that we are eager to enjoy sense gratification and other imaginings of the false ego. Sickness can help raise us out of the bodily conception by putting us deeply into bodily suffering. Thus, sickness can be one of the greatest boons from God.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Meditation 8 - Illness as a special gift from God
Books, The Beggar, Volume III: False Ego: The Greatest Enemy of the Spiritual Leader (Hari-Nama Press, 2002)

God , Sense , Suffering , Help

“There is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest; no one who does not take an active part in the responsibility of the defeat or victory. The prisoner in his chains and the king on his throne, the poor and the rich, the healthy and the infirm, the wise and the ignorant, the captive and the free, the old man and the child, the civilized and the savage, share equally in the combat. Every word that is pronounced, is either inspired by God or by the world, and necessarily proclaims, implicitly or explicitly, but always clearly, the glory of the one or the triumph of the other. In this singular warfare we all fight through forced enlistment; here the system of substitutes or volunteers finds no place. In it is unknown the exception of sex or age; here no attention is paid to him who says, I am the son of a poor widow; nor to the mother of the paralytic, nor to the wife of the cripple. In this warfare all men born of woman are soldiers.
And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

Men , God , War , Age

“The main thing missing from cartoons is today that old cartoons were cartoony. They did things you can't do in any other medium. Today's cartoons are very conservative and are more like live action. The characters look the same in every frame of the damn cartoon. The old cartoons squashed, stretched, and did crazy expressions. They were imaginative and crazy. A lot of cartoons aren't imaginative, they just say things. It might as well be radio. There is no point in having anything to look at in modern cartoons. But you can't say that about every cartoon. Genndy Tartakovsky's cartoons are beautiful. The closest thing now to what I'm saying is SpongeBob but even that doesn't go very far. It's like a conservative version of Ren & Stimpy.”

John Kricfalusi (1955) Canadian animator

Daniel Robert Epstein (Oct 12, 2004), " John Kricfalusi, interview http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/John%20Kricfalusi/", SuicideGirls, retrieved 2011-03-01

Beauty

“The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.”

Amos Oz (1939–2018) Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual

"Between Oz and Ayalon" (interview), the Supplement to Shabbat, 21 November 2008, Yedioth Ahronoth, p. 2.

People

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

“You know that episode where I said I'd stopped drinking? Well, I lied. Ted is so militant in his views. I lived with him for 12 days and it's hard to imagine ever doing anything that would truly look good in his eyes. Also he said some stuff online about Dimebag which I thought was really not cool. I'm not going to repeat it but you can check it out online.”

Sebastian Bach (1968) Canadian singer

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=60702 Blabbermouth.net (October 21, 2006)

Drink

“If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.”
Si quem enim videris deditum ventri, humi serpentem hominem, frutex est, non homo, quem vides; si quem in fantasiae quasi Calipsus vanis praestigiis cecucientem et subscalpenti delinitum illecebra sensibus mancipatum, brutum est, non homo, quem vides. Si recta philosophum ratione omnia discernentem, hunc venereris; caeleste est animal, non terrenum. Si purum contemplatorem corporis nescium, in penetralia mentis relegatum, hic non terrenum, non caeleste animal: hic augustius est numen humana carne circumvestitum.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola book Oration on the Dignity of Man

8. 40-42; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Sense , Clothes

“I note that once again there is serious talk of trying to attract tourists to this country after the war… [b]ut it is quite safe to prophesy that the attempt will be a failure. Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away…. But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-ﬁve past, and which have done their best to turn the pubs into mere boozing shops by excluding children from them.
How downtrodden we are in comparison with most other peoples is shown by the fact that even people who are far from being ""temperance"" don't seriously imagine that our licensing laws could be altered. Whenever I suggest that pubs might be allowed to open in the afternoon, or to stay open till midnight, I always get the same answer: ""The ﬁrst people to object would be the publicans. They don't want to have to stay open twelve hours a day."" People assume, you see, that opening hours, whether long or short, must be regulated by the law, even for one-man businesses. In France, and in various other countries, a café proprietor opens or shuts just as it suits him. He can keep open the whole twenty-four hours if he wants to; and, on the other hand, if he feels like shutting his cafe and going away for a week, he can do that too. In England we have had no such liberty for about a hundred years, and people are hardly able to imagine it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

As I Please column in The Tribune (18 August 1944), http://alexpeak.com/twr/dwall/
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

War , Children , People , Law

“Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

History , Understanding , Question

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

John Green book The Fault in Our Stars

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Love , Death , War , People

“It's impossible to explain what I felt in that moment, just very, very happy to win this title. For me, it is a dream to play in this tournament. But to win, I never imagined something like this.”

Rafael Nadal (1986) Spanish tennis player

After beating five time champion Roger Federer in the 2008 Men's Wimbledon Final

Dreams , Happiness

“Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting.”

Vera Rubin (1928–2016) American astronomer

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (1997), p. 219

Science

“The revolutionary atmosphere remained as I had first known it. General and private, peasant and militiaman, still met as equals; everyone drew the same pay, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone else 'thou' and 'comrade'; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Food , Chance , Clothes

“Dismissing poetry is dismissing the glory of the imagination. Teaching English to adolescents for twenty years gives me the authority to say, "Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. Kill the metaphor and you kill desire; the image magnetizes the movement of the energy." I will make this clear as I speak. The tax money that is being withdrawn from arts programs in schools will be spent on prisons.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 165

Money , School , Art , Soul

“Dear Miss Glory, we've already had at least a hundred saviors and prophets here. Every boat brings another one. Missionaries, anarchists, the Salvation Army, everything imaginable. It would amaze you to know how many churches and lunatics there are in the world.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

World

“If the development by the enemy as well as by us of thermonuclear weapons could have been averted, I think we would be in a somewhat safer world today than we are…I do not think we want to argue technical questions here, and I do not think it is very meaningful for me to speculate as to how we would have responded had the technical picture at that time been more as it was later.
However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

Oppenheimer testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings, discussing the American reaction to the first successful Russian test of an atomic bomb and the debate whether to develop the "super" hydrogen bombs with vastly higher explosive power; from volume II of the Oppenheimer hearing transcripts http://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Oppenheimer%20hearings/Vol%20II%20Oppenheimer.pdf, pg 95/266 (emphasis added)

World , Way , Question , Thinking

“I knew I wanted to wrestle when I was little kid. It took hold in me, captured my imagination. … I’m bigger now than I was eating meat. My lifts in the gym are better. I’m in better shape. … I’m healthier than everybody else. All the omega-3s make me smarter. … I’m pretty much friendly and compassionate to everybody. But not to people in the ring.”

Daniel Bryan (1981) American professional wrestler

"Meatless Monday: WWE Superstar Daniel Bryan Stomps On Meat" by Ellen Kanner, HuffPost (16 April 2012) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-kanner/meatless-monday-wwe-super_b_1424303.html.

People

“Imagine that. All the men of Germany marching in step with even their wotsits hanging the same way.”

Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) German writer and playwright

Wabschke, The Captain of Köpenick Tr. Ron Hutchinson (2013)
Qotes

Men , Way

“One who imagines himself to be all-knowing will surely suffer on account of his ignorance.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Suffering

“Christianity… is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it. Attributed in "The West and the Rest", by Niall Ferguson, Penguin 2011”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Kindle edition
Attributed

“I had a bad PCP [angel dust] experience when I was 14 and I got panic disorder. And of course, I wasn’t telling anyone the truth. It’s not like you go to your dad or your doctor and say, “Yeah, I smoked PCP and I’m having a bad time.” So I became more or less agoraphobic because I’d have flashbacks. From 14 to 16, I didn’t have any friends. I stayed home most of the time. Up till then life was pretty great. The world was big and I felt I could do anything I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t do anything. But in the isolation, my imagination really had time to run. I never did any drugs until my late 20s. Unfortunately, being a child of two alcoholics, I started drinking a lot, and that’s what eventually got me back into drugs. You often hear that pot leads to harder drugs. But I think alcohol is what leads you to everything, because it takes away the fear. The worst drug experimentation I ever did was because I was drunk and didn’t care.”

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

Talking about drugs, quoted in **
Audioslave Era

Life , Alcohol , Truth , World

“Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Fear , Appearance

“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3

Knowledge

“Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

p 69.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Men , Pleasure , World , History

“If you rob someone who would help you if you needed help you only rob yourself. […] Do you imagine you can be cruel without teaching others to be cruel to you?”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 3, Ch. 17
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

Help

“[Some correspondents] rightly claimed that State patronage [for artists and authors] is a better guarantee against starvation than private patronage, but seemed to me too ready to disregard the censorship that this implies. The usual line was that it is better for the artist to be a responsible member of a community than an anarchic individualist. The issue, however, is not between irresponsible "self-expression" and discipline; it is between truth and lies. Artists don't so much object to aesthetic discipline. Architects will design theatres or churches equally readily, writers will switch from the three-volume novel to the one-volume, or from the play to the film, according to the demand. But the point is that this is a political age. A writer inevitably writes—and less directly this applies to all the arts—about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be the truth. But no government, no big organization, will pay for the truth. To take a crude example: can you imagine the British Government commissioning E. M. Forster to write A Passage to India?”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

He could only write it because he was not dependent on State aid.
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (13 October 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/ http://alexpeak.com/twr/ooc/#2</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

Truth , Age , Art , Communication

“Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France.”

Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) French critic and historian

" Napoleon's Views of Religion https://archive.org/stream/jstor-25102177/25102177_djvu.txt" (1891)

Loss , Future

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.”

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

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, V.
1930s

Music

“For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.”
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura. hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest non radii solis neque lucida tela diei discutiant sed naturae species ratioque.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Children , Fear , Law , Nature

“Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun" http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/fun.html, Tribune (20 December 1943)
Context: Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

Perfection

“Ethiopia has always held a special place in my own imagination and the prospect of visiting attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England and America combined.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

On a 1961 conference held in Ethiopia, as quoted in Rivonia Unmasked (1965) by Strydom Lautz, p. 108; also in ‪Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Nelson Mandela : An Ecological Study‬ (2002), by J. C. Buthelezi, p. 172
1960s
Context: Ethiopia has always held a special place in my own imagination and the prospect of visiting attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England and America combined. I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African. Meeting the emperor himself would be like shaking hands with history.

“One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 3
Context: Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.
One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

World

“Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Source: On War (1832), Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 3, Paragraph 1.
Context: Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.

War , People , Art , Way

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Friedrich Hayek book The Fatal Conceit

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Ch. 5: The Fatal Conceit.
Context: Whereas, in fact, specialised students, even after generations of effort, find it exceedingly difficult to explain such matters, and cannot agree on what are the causes or what will be the effects of particular events. The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

Men

“Art should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”

Keith Haring (1958–1990) American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s b…

People , Art , Soul

“Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.”

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) French painter and printmaker

Memory

“If your boss is getting you down, look at him through the prongs of a fork and imagine him in jail.”

Ricky Gervais (1961) English comedian, actor, director, producer, musician, writer, and former radio presenter

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance... Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of... (their) rights. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

“If we dwell on real or imagined sins of the past, we shall never be able to find one another in the present, nor shall we be able to work together on building the future.”

F. W. de Klerk (1936) South African politician

Speech to the Good-will Foundation (9 March 1991)
1990s

Past , Future

“He would only drift and sink, drift and sink, like the others of his family; but worse than them - down, down into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only dimly imagine. It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 7

Money , Family , God , War

“When I saw how animals are tortured on factory farms, I couldn't justify being a part of that cruelty. I thought, "Imagine if that were me."”

Oliver Sykes (1986) British musician

Straight away, I said, "That's it – I'm going vegetarian".

"Oli Sykes joins animal rights campaign" https://web.archive.org/web/20131105210441/http://www.kerrang.com/blog/2008/10/oli_sykes_joins_animal_rights.html, interview with Kerrang! (30 October 2008).

Animals , Parting

“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Source: "Can Socialists Be Happy?" https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/, Tribune (20 December 1943). Published under the name ‘John Freeman’.

Business , Happiness , Perfection , Thinking

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dream, and endeavours to live the life which he had imagines, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

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

Life , Confidence , Success , Dreams

“Oversleeping will only save you from having wild imaginations during the day. But those same imaginations are necessary in every genius. You need them while you are awake and not asleep!”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“The act of divorce shows the immaturity of the human being in love. We think and imagine that we know so much about love, but we don't know anything at all.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Thinking , Love

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S.... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance to the new nation. Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of civic, property and employment rights. What would be the reaction of the United States? I have no doubt that it would be immediate military intervention. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the New Russia and Ukraine (May 1994)

“Your imagination is an extremely powerful tool.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

“The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

William Gibson book Pattern Recognition

Source: Pattern Recognition

Sense , Past , Future

“What year is it in your imagination?”

Lynda Barry (1956) Cartoonist

Source: What It Is

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Life , People , Dreams

“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Way , Sense , Childhood

“Life may contain the "essence" (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the "elixir"; and eventually you may even be privileged to "make" something out of it, "to compound the story." But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.”

Hannah Arendt book Men in Dark Times

Source: Men in Dark Times

Life

“Thank heaven I don't inherit God from anybody! I am free to make mine up as I wish Him. He's kind and sympathetic and imaginative and forgiving and understanding - and He has a sense of humor.”

Jean Webster (1876–1916) American novelist

God , Forgiveness , Understanding , Sense

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry And June

Way , Kiss

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions) ISBN: 0-0112-1273-4 0-0112-1252-1

“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?”

Christine de Pizan (1365–1430) Italian French late medieval author

Source: Der Sendbrief vom Liebesgott / The Letter of the God of Love

Women

“Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Keys to the Demon Prison

Hell

“If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what is the natural state? the state of nature from which he has been removed? imagine, wandering up and down the forest without industry, without speech, and without home.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Home , Nature

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Lolita

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”

N. Scott Momaday (1934) American author

“Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Zettel

Beauty

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Hate

“Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Hope , Way , Courage

“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

Lie

“There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

Love

“No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) Austrian composer

People , Feeling , Understanding , Reality

“Why does the eye see more clearly when asleep than the imagination when awake?”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Variant: Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Lovers

“In our imaginations we can go anywhere. Travel with me to Redwall in Mossflower country.”

Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels

Travel , Country

“What can be imagined—
—need never be lost.”

Clive Barker book Weaveworld

Part Nine “Into the Gyre”, Chapter iii “The Miracle of the Loom” (p. 429; catchphrase frequently repeated)
(1987), BOOK TWO: THE FUGUE
Source: Weaveworld

“Life has more imagination than we do.”

Francois Truffaut (1932–1984) film director

Life

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book Interpreter of Maladies

Source: Interpreter of Maladies

Travel , Appearance , Time , Personality

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Life

“I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Pain , Loneliness

“He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.”

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

"Nathaniel Hawthorne" in Library of the World's Best Literature, vol. XII (1897), ed. Charles Dudley Warner.

Beauty , Autumn , Light

“Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.

Yes, murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; and when they grow older they know it.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Money , People

“There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

World , Evil , Madness

“All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!”

Saul Bellow book Henderson the Rain King

General sources
Source: Henderson the Rain King (1959) [Viking/Penguin, 1984, ISBN 0-140-07269-1], ch. XVIII, p. 271

Nature , Personality

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician

Sense

“Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Lying , Literature

“You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Dreams , Girl , Daughters

“You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Dreams , Sleep , Parting

“It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Dreams

“A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Understanding , Falseness

“Only Evil and Greater Evil exist and beyond them, in the shadows, lurks True Evil. True Evil, Geralt, is something you can barely imagine, even if you believe nothing can still surprise you. And sometimes True Evil seizes you by the throat and demands that you choose between it and another, slightly lesser, Evil.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Source: The Last Wish

Evil

“He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine…”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

“Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.”

Anna Funder book All That I Am

Source: All That I Am

People , Suffering

“You imagination is more important than your knowledge.”

Mike Murdock (1946) American televangelist

Knowledge

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Pain , People , Soul , Light

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”

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

Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138. This may be an edited version of some nearly identical quotes from the 1929 Viereck interview below.
1930s
Context: I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

World , Birth , Knowledge