Quotes about imagination
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“There's nothing worse than waiting and not knowing what'll happen to you. Your own imagination can be crueler than any captor.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Waiting

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

War, Reality

“Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Life, Dreams

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”

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

Variant: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.

Powerful

“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.”

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Variant: The world is but a canvas to the imagination. Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday

World

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

McKenna interview (1992)
Context: I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

Understanding, Thinking

“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”

C.G. Jung book Psychological Types

Source: Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921), Ch. 1, p. 82
Context: The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

Birth

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Felice

Variant: You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.
Source: Letters to Felice‎

Heart

“One of the most poisonous of all Satan’s whispers is simply, “Things will never change.” That lie kills expectation, trapping our heart forever in the present. To keep desire alive and flourishing, we must renew our vision for what lies ahead. Things will not always be like this. Jesus has promised to “make all things new.” Eye has not seen, ear has not heard all that God has in store for his lovers, which does not mean “we have no clue so don’t even try to imagine,” but rather, you cannot outdream God. Desire is kept alive by imagination, the antidote to resignation. We will need imagination, which is to say, we will need hope.”

John Eldredge

Source: The Sacred Romance Drawing Closer To The Heart Of God

God, Lie, Hope, Lovers

“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Support

“You are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie We Should All Be Feminists

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists#t-1300116 We should all be feminists

Problem

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 43 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-43.html Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Dependency

“But anyone with the time and the inclination can acquire technical proficiency. To achieve greatness, though, that requires artistry. That requires imagination and thoughtfulness…”

Christopher Paolini book Inheritance

Source: Inheritance

Time

“There are no such things as limits to growth, because there
are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence,
imagination, and wonder.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Intelligence

“I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Revenge, Time

“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

Knowledge, Science

“We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

Thinking, Personality

“Whatever you do, protect those you care for. Without them, life is more miserable than you can imagine.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Source: Brisingr

Life

“Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.”

Terry Pratchett book Going Postal

Source: Going Postal

“Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.”

Terry Pratchett book Maskerade

Source: Maskerade

People

“An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice… or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today.”

Jim Davis (1945) American cartoonist and creator of Garfield

Memory, Past, Future, Painting

“Doors are for people with no imagination.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

People

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

“Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.”

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

Life, Thinking

“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

Children, Education, Way

“Man - a figment of God's imagination.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

God

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Hell, Wine

“I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: An Object Of Beauty

Life

“Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Smile

“his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“Reading activates and exercises the mind.
Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts.
Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Exercises, Reading

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Pain, Stupidity, Feeling, Understanding

“I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.”

Malcolm X book The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Sense

“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Source: Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass

Learning, Time

“Imagination is a quality that was given to man compensate him from whats not. The sense of humor was given to console him from what is.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Sense

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Source: If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Feeling, Intelligence, Learning, Time

“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

Light

“Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1998) by David Pringle, ISBN 0-87951-937-1, and The Definitive Illustrated Guide to Fantasy (2003) by David Pringle, ISBN 1-84442-930-X
General sources

Intelligence

“An awakened imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Suffering, Funny

“If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

God, Error, Effort, Sincerity

“The wind is the moon's imagination wandering.”

Saul Williams (1972) American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor

“So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.

And live
your life.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Red Bird

Life, World

“It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Love, World, Memory, Time

“To experience the ultimate you have to be willing to obliterate the self-created boundaries of individuality, you have to be willing to dissolve. That state of unbounded freedom is a state of oneness with Shiva – an unconditioned state beyond physical experience, beyond imaginative speculation, beyond all conceptual understanding.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga

Understanding, Freedom

“You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.”

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) British writer

Source: Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels

Life, People, Idea, Change

“The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I
Variant: Action... is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Dreams

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

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

Light

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Conservation Esthetic", p. 176.
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that contribute in subtle ways to his own undoing. To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Parting

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Truth, Beauty

“I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension. That is just not an acceptable approach. And if we think it’s going to be hard -- if we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up. It’s not going to get easier. It’s going to get harder. So we might as well do it now -- pull off the Band-Aid; eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when?”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Regarding stopgap measures for the federal budget, White House press conference (11 July 2011) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/07/11/press-conference-president 2011, Remarks on the economy (July 2011)

Guy, Thinking, Time, Season

“When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"The Doctrine of Free Will"
1930s, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? (1930)

Way, Birth, Thinking

“Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

“I cannot imagine a world without music. It would be... well, I cannot imagine it.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Berklee College of Music commencement address (May 12, 2007)
2007, 2008

World, Music

“I can already picture us sitting there with dreadlocks, smoking a huge joint, listening to reaggae-music and in front of us a steaming beer. Seriously: Can you imagine such a thing?”

Joschka Fischer (1948) German politician

Ich sehe uns schon mit Dreadlocks da sitzen und eine riesige Tüte rauchen, im Hintergrund Reggae-Music und vor uns ein dampfendes Bier. Im Ernst: Wie stellen Sie sich das vor?
After the 2005 Bundestags election discussion of the so-called Jamaica coalition.

Music, Beer

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

Paraphrased variant: We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Harvard address (2008)

World

“One may view the individual’s everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective reality… [for example] ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ and ‘Fine, darling, have a good day at the office’ implies an entire world within which these apparently simple propositions make sense… the exchange confirms the subjective reality of this world… the great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality… imagine the effect…of an exchange like this: ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Fine, darling, don’t forget to take along your gun.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 147-163

Life, World, Reality, Sense

“He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Rudolph Nureyev quoted in Cooke, Alistair. "Fred Astaire Obituary", Letter From America, BBC World Service, June 1987.

Time

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. … The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it.”

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

Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Children, Truth

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Life, Memory

“Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines. There are the Mind Cure, the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and the Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with the same old, powerful instrument—the patient's imagination. Differing names, but no difference in the process. But they do not give that instrument the credit; each sect claims that its way differs from the ways of the others.

They all achieve some cures, there is no question about it; and the Faith Cure and the Prayer Cure probably do no harm when they do no good, since they do not forbid the patient to help out the cure with medicines if he wants to; but the others bar medicines, and claim ability to cure every conceivable human ailment through the application of their mental forces alone. There would seem to be an element of danger here. It has the look of claiming too much, I think. Public confidence would probably be increased if less were claimed.”

Mark Twain Christian Science

Book I, Ch. 4
Christian Science (1907)

Faith, Way, Confidence, Question

“You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. You just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it. When people struggle through things on their own, using their own abilities - they learn how to live. You have to be one heard-hearted sonofabitch to allow this, but it's what's best for people. Think about that. What's the alternative? If we cater to people all the time, then we end up becoming a major cause of them becoming people who are always catered to. This is an incredibly important lesson in the triumph of fostering independence over casual compassion.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

People, Home, Thinking, Learning

“"That light," said the Chaplain, "is it going up or coming down?"
"It's coming down," said Lord Asriel, "but it isn't light. It's Dust."
Something in the way he said it made Lyra imagine dust with a capital letter, as if this wasn't ordinary dust. The reaction of the Scholars confirmed her feeling, because Lord Asriel's words caused a sudden collective silence, followed by gasps of incredulity.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995), Ch. 1 : The Decanter of Tokay

Way, Feeling, Light, Silence

“Some forms of Kantianism put great weight on “what we can imagine” holding that this can be a source of insight into necessary connections. Thus various of Kant’s arguments about space and time depend on the purported fact that it is impossible for us to imagine certain things: we can know, Kant claims, a priori that space has only three dimensions because we cannot imagine it as having more than three dimensions. History in the form of non-Euclidean geometry and modern physics has put paid to that particular line of argument, but in general we should beware of depending too much on “What we can imagine?,” especially in politics. As Nietzsche puts it somewhere, sometimes the fact that you can’t imagine a situation in which things are very different from the way they are now is not an especially good argument for the claim that they must be as they now are, but, rather, represents a failure of your powers about which you should feel mildly apologetic.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 48-49.

Way, Feeling, History, Failure

“What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

People, Stupidity, Error, Nature

“I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1960s, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969)

Wisdom, Hate, World, Beauty

“When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Disappointment

“The ideal "Life of Jesus" [biography] at the close of the nineteenth century is the "Life" which Heinrich Julius Holtzmann did not write — but which can be pieced together from his commentary on the synoptic gospels and his new testament theology. It is ideal because, for one thing, it is unwritten, and arises only in the idea of the reader by the aid of his own imagination, and, for another, because it is traced only in the most general outline.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 296

Life, Idea

“The true function of logic … as applied to matters of experience … is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), p. 8

World

“That cold January day - and so many people… I'd never imagined it would happen nowadays.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

Television documentary 'Queen Margrethe of Denmark', BBC & Jørgen Bonfils, 08:50, 28 April 1974.
Becoming Queen

People

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 203.

World, Nostalgia

“So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Sidonia speaking
Book 4, Chap. 15.
Books, Coningsby (1844)

World

“There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

http://books.google.com/books?id=YnY10fNqqp4C&q=%22There+is+some+irony+in+the+fact+that+children+imagine+that+parents+can+do+what+they+want+and+parents+imagine+that+children+do+When+I+grow+up+parallels+Oh+to+be+a+child+again%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

Children, Parent

“I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less — freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns…”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Laura, Scene Seven
The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Feeling, Home, Horse

“It's been by turns frustrating and fascinating and wonderful beyond imagination. If what I suspect is true, it's one of the most important milestones in human history to acknowledge that we are not alone in the universe.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Greer describes his campaign for disclosure.
Undated

History, Universe

“Again and again the imaginary plan on which one attempts to build up that order breaks down and then we must try another. This imaginative vision and faith in the ultimate success are indispensable. The pure rationalist has no place here.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Where Is Science Going? (1932)

Faith, Success

“Imagination is an infinite resource that cannot be diminished by overuse or underuse.”

Patch Adams (1945) Physician, activist, diplomat, author

Source: House Calls: How we can all heal the world one visit at a time (1998), p. 58

“My kind of female power can’t be owned. I may feign enslavement, but I never let myself be unloved, even by myself, that would not do. I rarely argue - I consider. I wait till enough information is in and then the answer, answers itself. My imagination does tolerate empty space. Female power does not disagree with a compliment. Compliments shall be relished, like rich chocolate, like an inside caress. I make time to feel it, all the way up and down my body. Let the world please you. Use your female power. It was set up that way.”

Julie Newmar (1933) American actress

Female Power http://www.julienewmarwrites.com/story.php?idStory=122 (April 28, 2017)

World, Way, Feeling, Time

“We are joined today by inspiring entrepreneurs from more than 120 countries and many from across Africa. And all of you embody a spirit that we need to take on some of the biggest challenges that we face in the world -- the spirit of entrepreneurship, the idea that there are no limits to the human imagination; that ingenuity can overcome what is and create what needs to be. And everywhere I go, across the United States and around the world, I hear from people, but especially young people, who are ready to start something of their own -- to lift up people’s lives and shape their own destinies. And that’s entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship creates new jobs and new businesses, new ways to deliver basic services, new ways of seeing the world -- it’s the spark of prosperity. It helps citizens stand up for their rights and push back against corruption. Entrepreneurship offers a positive alternative to the ideologies of violence and division that can all too often fill the void when young people don’t see a future for themselves. Entrepreneurship means ownership and self-determination, as opposed to simply being dependent on somebody else for your livelihood and your future. Entrepreneurship brings down barriers between communities and cultures and builds bridges that help us take on common challenges together. Because one thing that entrepreneurs understand is, is that you don't have to look a certain way, or be of a certain faith, or have a certain last name in order to have a good idea.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at United Nations Compound in Nairobi, Kenya (July 25, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-global-entrepreneurship-summit 2015

People, World, Faith, Way

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Comme tous les gens qui ne sont pas amoureux, il s'imaginait qu'on choisit la personne qu'on aime après mille délibérations et d'après des qualités et convenances diverses.
Pt. II, Ch. 1
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. IV: Cities of the Plain (1921-1922)

Love, Personality

“I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers…”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Quote from Manet's letter to Félix Bracquemond (18 March 1871); as cited in Manet by Himself (1995) by Julliet Wilson-Bareau
1850 - 1875

Fools

“Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations.”

Peg O'Connor (1965) American philosopher

"Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philosophy-stirred-not-shaken/201703/anxiety-is-part-human-nature, Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

God, People, World, Way

“I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen.”

Minnie Evans (1892–1987) American artist

Cited in: Paul Arnett, ‎William Arnett (2000), Souls Grown Deep: The tree gave the dove a leaf. p. 308

Drawing

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

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

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“Independent of biological need fulfillment and the reproductive needs of the species, cultures] satisfy not bodily needs, but values. Values define cultural man's need for rationality, meaningfulness in emotional experience, richness of imagination, and depth of faith. All cultures respond to such supra-biological values. But in what form they do so depends on the specific kind of values people happen to have.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 76.

People, Faith, Dependency

“These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 8)

Death, Wisdom, Soul

“It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Der thörigste von allen Irrthümern ist, wenn junge gute Köpfe glauben, ihre Originalität zu verlieren, indem sie das Wahre anerkennen, was von andern schon anerkannt worden.
Maxim 254, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

People, Truth, Error, Intelligence

“No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

Songs of Freedom by Irish Authors (1907) Introduction. Revolutionary Song https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1907/xx/revsong.htm

Love, Fear, Faith, Hope

“These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities — of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"The Angel Of The Odd: An Extravaganza".

Age, Understanding, Parting

“Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. … It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

People, Feeling, Sense

“Yes, it's embarrassing to be born again, but imagine how embarrassing it must have been to be born the first time. At least this time you get to wear clothes!”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997) In Concert

Time, Clothes

“No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.”

Mark Twain Christian Science

Book I, Ch. 4 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3187/3187-h/3187-h.htm#link2HCH0004 Christian Science (1907)

Education, Disease, Dreams, Exercises

“Always imagine yourself on the battlefield under the fiercest attack; never forget this crucial element of training.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

Source: Budo (1938), p. 36

Training, Forgetting

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry!”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Sometimes quoted as "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry" According to John A. Joyce's much-criticized biography Edgar Allen Poe (1901), this was said by Poe to William Barton. Disputed Source: Google Books link https://books.google.com/books?id=_cdEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=John+Alexander+Joyce+poe&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIsuLtsoXUyAIVVSqICh2cqAI_#v=onepage&q=%22chicanery%2C%20fear%22&f=false

Fear, Religion

“The language of imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect, of his aroused passions, of his devotion, of all the higher moods and temperaments of his mind.”

George Gilfillan (1813–1878) Scottish writer

Introduction
Bards of the Bible, 1850

Mood, Passion

“By using TV as a bra… the most intimate belonging of a human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers… to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Statement on TV Bra for a Living Scultpure (1969), cited in: C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia, "[http://artradarjournal.com/2014/10/24/nam-june-paik-becoming-robot-new-york/ Nam June Paik: “Becoming Robot” in New York – in pictures," at Art Radar journal, posted on 24/10/2014
1960s

Way

“We imagine that the Creator at the actual time of creation made only one single species for each natural order of plants, this species being different in habit and fructification from all the rest. That he made these mutually fertile, whence out of their progeny, fructification having been somewhat changed, Genera of natural classes have arisen as many in number as the different parents, and since this is not carried further, we regard this also as having been done by His Omnipotent hand directly in the beginning; thus all Genera were primeval and constituted a single Species. That as many Genera having arisen as there were individuals in the beginning, these plants in course of time became fertilised by others of different sort and thus arose Species until so many were produced as now exist… these Species were sometimes fertilised out of congeners, that is other Species of the same Genus, whence have arisen Varieties.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

Fundamenta fructificationis (1742). As quoted in John S. Wilkins (2009), "Species: A History of the Idea," University of California Press. p. 72

Nature, Parent, Change, Time

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Quotes about imagination
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