Quotes about imagination (3971 quotes, page 33)

“Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (p. xvi)
American Fictions (1999)

Family , Memory

“The intellect had rejected the rational basis of belief, yet the imagination & sensibility yearn for simple faith.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Faith

“We must face the fact that, though the free intelligence and the spirit of community are at once the goal and an essential means, they may be not only ineffectual but actually harmful, unless they are combined with a full measure of that hot indignation against tyranny, that devoted service in the struggle for the new order, which is characteristic of the best minds of the political Left. On the other hand, the political Left, if it is to capture the imagination and allegiance of the people of this country and sweep them forward to victory, must, I believe, learn a more liberal spirit. I mean, of course, liberal not in the political but in the cultural sense, namely, loyalty to the free critical intelligence and respect for the human individual.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter XIII: The Practical Upshot

People , Intelligence , Communication , Sense

“In any remembering, thinking or imagining, although the object of my intending is some state of affairs or other, I am also potentially aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of remembering, thinking, or imagining. My asserting that S is P is not an assertion of mine unless I am implicitly aware as I assert that I am asserting, not entertaining the possibility that, S is P.”

Robert B. Pippin (1948) American philosopher

Source: Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989), p. 21

Thinking

“The absurdity of monetary system which robs people first of their fair share in the "free market economy" and then - through some of the most inefficient procedures imaginable - returns some of this money in the form of welfare payments to the same people, has rarely been exposed by the "experts" nor been discussed in public.”

Margrit Kennedy (1939–2013) German architect

Source: Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995), Chapter Three, Who Would Profit From a New Monetary System?, p. 71

Money , People

““I have tried to find some explanation that does not rely on logic, but once the borders of rationality have been removed I cannot imagine what should take their place. How does one begin to measure? What standards should one apply?”
The prince understood what she meant. Once reason was no longer your guide, you were like a man stranded in a featureless landscape. There were no landmarks to use. One direction was as likely to yield results as any other.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 26 (p. 353)

“Legendre's Law of Quadratic Reciprocity' … is …the most important general truth in the science of integral numbers which has been discovered since the time of Fermat. It has been called by Gauss 'the gem of the higher arithmetic,' and is equally remarkable whether we consider the simplicity of its enunciation, the difficulties which for a long time attended its demonstration, or the number and variety of the results which have been obtained by its means. …[W]e find in the 'Opuscula Analytica' of Euler… a memoir… which contains a general and very elegant theorem from which the Law of Reciprocity is immediately deducible, and which is, vice versâ, deducible from that law. But Euler… expressly observes that the theorem is undemonstrated; and this would seem to be the only place in which he mentions it in connexion with the theory of the Residues of Powers; though in other researches he has frequently developed results which are consequences of the theorem, and which relate to the linear forms of the divisors of quadratic formulae. But here also his conclusions repose on induction only; though in one memoir he seems to have imagined… that he had obtained a satisfactory demonstration.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

Report on the Theory of Numbers (1859) Part I, pp. 56-57.
The Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894) Vol. 1

Truth , Law , Science , Time

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Death , People , World , Feeling

“By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so much value as the things which are included under these two heads.”

G. E. Moore book Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica (1903; revised edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Pleasure , Beauty , Art , Question

“We need 21st-century answers. And we will find satisfactory answers only if they are grounded in a vision we can all recognise, and one that seeks the common good. It is no use treating God as a means to a 21st-century Europe: to do so is the creation of an idol, not the service of the true God whose revelation in Christ is the foundation of our values. I shall be seeking to argue that Europe's future lies in a process of subsidiarity, re-imagination and inclusion, especially the development of concepts of intermediate communities of many kinds. This is a theological vision, one that allows commonality of vision, but sets strong boundaries to what is acceptable.”

Justin Welby (1956) British Anglican bishop; the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury

Address to the Catholic Institute of Paris (November 19, 2016)

God , Communication , Strong , Future

“What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?”

Orson Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

God , Change , Past

“Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 71, "Lester Johnson's Abstract Men"

Art , History , Game , Painting

“Reader! Imagine a school-boy who has outgrown his clothes. Imagine the repairs made on the vestments where the enlarged frame had burst the narrow limits of its inclosure. Imagine the additions made where the projecting limbs had fairly and far emerged beyond the confines of the garment. Imagine the boy still growing, and the clothes, mended all over, now more than ever in want of mending”

John Joseph Griffin (1802–1877) English chemist and publisher

such is chemistry, and such its nomenclature.
Chemical Recreations (7th Edition, 1834) "The Romance of Chemistry" p189

School , Boy , Clothes

“He paused a moment and then pointed to the brook. "You see that the water divides there and flows on each side of a great rock. Now, if we imagine the brook endowed with consciousness, no doubt the stream on the right of the rock will feel itself separate from the stream on the left, but to us they are plainly continuous and the same. So I suppose every life in the world flows from the same infinite source and finally returns to it and while feeling itself separate, because limited and partial, is really continuous and the same.”

John William Lloyd (1857–1940) American anarchist, sexologist, utopian theorist and author (1857-1940)

Source: The Natural Man (1902), p. 95

Life , World , Feeling , Water

“Aron, if I said to you 'Imagine there's no New York, it's easy if you try,' I'm not saying New York doesn't exist, I'm saying it does exist, but imagine that it doesn't, and that's what John Lennon is saying.”

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

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

“There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last hour or so, including two hijacked planes being flown deliberately into the World Trade Center. I am afraid we can only imagine the terror and the carnage there and the many, many innocent people who will have lost their lives. I know that you would want to join with me in sending the deepest condolences to President Bush and to the American people on behalf of the British people at these terrible events.This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it together and eradicate this evil completely from our world.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Trades Union Congress http://www.tuc.org.uk/congress/tuc-3709-f0.cfm
Speech to the Trades Union Congress. 11 September 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of that day had begun.
2000s

Life , People , World , Democracy

“Chamberlain's stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and finally the fateful journey to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb and strengthened his position in Europe, in Germany, in the Army, beyond anything that could have been imagined a few weeks before. It also added immeasurably to the power of the Third Reich vis-à-vis the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Fate , Democracy

““Ego itself is a fiction created in the mind by circular patterns of thinking based on separation. So, 'the ego is the fiction in the mind' - what does that mean? [It means] that ego is basically our sense of self, and the thoughts, ideas and beliefs that circle around that sense of self that go into deriving a bigger, more conceptualized version of ourself. In other words: who we think and imagine ourselves to be.””

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

The Basic Teachings - Part 1: Principles of the Teaching (2009)

Idea , Thinking , Sense

“Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. It's a very archaic form. Same things can be said with words, writing poetry, making sounds, music. It is a unique thing.... I think that the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt and the way we talked all the time, was a kind of a.... you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied as if the act of painting was not making a picture.... it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible.... I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself to see if I could create.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 66

School , Music , Way , Thinking

“The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign manner, as though they were kings of the earth, playing Providence not only for themselves but for the far future—reaching out into the future with the wrong kind of far-sightedness, and gambling on a lot of risky calculations in which there must never be a single mistake. And it is a defect in such enthusiasts that they seem unwilling to leave anything to Providence, unwilling even to leave the future flexible, as one must do; and they forget that in any case, for all we know, our successors may decide to switch ideals and look for a different utopia before any of our long shots have reached their objective, or any of our long-range projects have had fulfillment. It is agreeable to all the processes of history, therefore, that each of us should rather do the good that is straight under our noses. Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world and then leave the leaven to leaven the whole lump, than those who are for ever thinking that life is vain unless one can act through the central government, carry legislation, achieve political power and do big things.”

Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) British historian

Christianity and History (1949), p. 104.

Life , People , World , History

“Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 7

People , Books , Night

“This century has been so rich in discovery and so packed with technical innovation that it is tempting to believe that there can never be another like it. That conceit betrays the poverty of our collective imagination.”

John Maddox (1925–2009) Welsh chemist, physicist, journalist and editor

Introduction of [What remains to be discovered: mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race, Martin Kessler Books, 1998, 068482292X, 1]

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains

Way , Question , Passion

“It is under such cultural circumstances that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanicism and the architecture of auto-punition, by psychological bureaucratic congratulations, by ideological disorder and imaginative fasting, by affective paternal hungers of all kinds, seek in vain - to bite into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial hack of some hitlerian nurse, in order at last to be able, no matter how, to communicate with the totemic consecrated host that has just been elevated in front of their own noses and which, as is known and understood, was nothing else than the spiritual and symbolic nourishment that catholicism offered during the centuries to appease the cannibal frenzy of moral and irrational hungers.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from from: Dalí's essay, 1935: Conquest of the Irrational https://ia601209.us.archive.org/4/items/DaliConquestIrrational/412994-Dali_ReducedPDF.pdf - Chapter: 'The Waters in which we Swim; Julien Levi Publisher, New York, 1935. p. 8
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

Hunger , Communication

“You plunge into that underworld space, and that's also where you begin to nurse feelings of resentment and aggrievement and murder and homicide, and even worse. If people are betrayed enough, they become obsessed with the futility of being itself, and they go to places where perhaps no one would ever want to go if they were in their right mind. And they begin to nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge, and that's a horrible place to be. And that's hell. That's why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld, because if you get plunged into a situation that you don't understand, and things are not good for you anymore, it's only one step from being completely confused, to being completely outraged and resentful, and then it's only one step from there to really looking for revenge. And that can take you places – well, that merely to imagine properly can be traumatic. And I've seen that with people many times. And I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves can see how that happens, because I can't imagine that there isn't a single person in the room who hasn't nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge, at least at one point in their life – and usually for what appear to be good reasons. It can shake your faith in being to be betrayed, but if it shakes it so badly that you turn against being itself, that's certainly no solution. All it does is make everything that's bad, even worse.”

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

Other

Life , People , Faith , Feeling

“Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.”

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

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. V, Reason in Science, Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

World , Mathematics , Nature , Laughter

“I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#139
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Star , Reality , Sleep , Change

“Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the US. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov -- a scene I witnessed in a recreation room strewn with rock albums at my college dormitory in upstate New York in 1965.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age (2004)

Books , Universe , Passion , Patience

“Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

Money , Thinking , Happiness

“No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

Hate , World , Fear , Way

“I imagine that whatever contribution I can make to teaching derives from having had to rethink and re-create my technique.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

“[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight… induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized.”

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

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV

Truth , Faith , Nature

“The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have past and future, to have history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop, nor decay (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Freedom
Source: I am That, P.189.

History , Past , Future

“I was very sickly and weak during the first years of my infancy, and was, as much as I can remember of myself, a very whimsical boy. Sometimes I learned with enthusiasm, and often found myself in such a kind of ecstasy, that I neither could see nor hear what passed around me. In these fits of thought I forgot playthings and playfellows; I was happy only in my own musings. I always preferred the company of little girls to boys. I was not ten years old when I presented them with some poetry and little verses, the effusions of my heated imagination; some of them fell into my hands in riper years, and after reading them over, I left off poetry altogether. I loved my first private teacher very much; I even can remember him now. My second teacher was a simpleton; he could never understand me, nor enter into my feelings. My antipathy to this man grew daily greater; I could not learn of him, nor could he teach me anything. At last, when in my thirteenth year, I got rid of him, and he being encumbered with debts, I gave him my saving-box when he left. Whether I did this for pity's sake, or joy to get rid of him, I did not know.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Love , Feeling , Girl , Boy

“It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Daily Telegraph 10 January 2002
2000s, 2002

Love , Smile , Home , Bird

“What people report is not properties of their image but of the objects they are imagining. Such properties as color, shape, size and so on are clearly properties of the objects that are being imagined. This distinction is crucial. The seemingly innocent scope slip that takes image of object X with property Pro mean (image of object X) with property P instead of the correct image of (object X with property P) is probably the most ubiquitous and damaging conclusion in the whole imagery literature.”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Pylyshyn (1981, 18-19), as cited in: Ken Clements, "Visual imagery and school mathematics." For the learning of mathematics 2.2 (1981): 2-9.

People , Color , Literature

“Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience."”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 1

World , Nature , Sense , Appearance

“All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"The Poet & The City", p. 84
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“Dots […]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 16

“What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism — as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons — Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Beauty , Animals

“As a result we shall have the necessary variety of clothes, even if the people of a given city lack the imagination themselves. The happiness of our Futurist clothes will help to spread the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend PaIazzeschi in his futurist 'Manifesto against Sadness.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

(Manuscript, 1913); as quoted at dekorera.tumblr: futurist manifesto of men's clothing http://dekorera.tumblr.com/post/3212646425/futurist-manifesto-of-mens-clothing-by-giacomo
Futurist Manifesto of Men's clothing,' 1913/1914

People , Sadness , Help , Clothes

“There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Women , Sense , Help

““Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir—”
“It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 2

Life , Death , Age , Sense

“At one time, the race depended upon quantity for survival," Toby said. "Now it is destroying itself. We believe that man's unique characteristics, imagination, psychic understanding, sympathy, and so forth, are being undermined. Even if the race survives physically, it won't be the same race. We won't be bright enough to recognize our fall from grace, either; that's the hell of it. Tests show that though our mental capacity is as great as ever, our use of it has slumped to an astonishing degree.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 66

Hell , Understanding , Time , Dependency

“I just can’t imagine being in a world and not being fascinated with what ideas are doing to us.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

World , Idea

“That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"Tree at My Window" (1928)
1920s

Fate , Weather

“Life is my creation
Is my best friend
Imagination
Is my defense
And I'll keep walking
When skies are grey
Whatever happens was meant that way.”

Kerli (1987) Estonian singer

The Creationist
Love is Dead (2008)

Life , Way

“Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.”

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

Page 251.
The Savage God (1971)

Art

“The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of his goodness. If he wasn’t angered, he wouldn’t be good. We cannot separate God’s goodness from his anger. Again, if God is good by nature, he must be unspeakably angry at wickedness. But his goodness is so great that his anger isn’t confined to the evils of rape and murder. Nothing is hidden from his pure and holy eyes. He is outraged by torture, terrorism, abortion, theft, lying, adultery, fornication, pedophilia, homosexuality, and blasphemy. He also sees our thought-life, and he will judge us for the hidden sins of the heart: for lust, hatred, rebellion, greed, unclean imaginations, ingratitude, selfishness, jealousy, pride, envy, deceit, etc. Jesus warned, “But I say to you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.””

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

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Life , Men , God , Jealousy

“For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand which alone can unite the elements of worlds as they float in gasses, equally from His mysterious laboratory, and scatter them again into thin air when the works of His hand cease to find favour in His view.
Let those who would substitute the voice of the created for that of the Creator, who shout "the people, the people," instead of hymning the praises of their God, who vainly imagine that the masses are sufficient for all things, remember their insignificance and tremble. They are but mites amid millions of other mites, that the goodness of providence has produced for its own wise ends; their boasted countries, with their vaunted climates and productions, have temporary possessions of but small portions of a globe that floats, a point, in space, following the course pointed out by an invisible finger, and which will one day be suddenly struck out of its orbit, as it was originally put there, by the hand that made it. Let that dread Being, then, be never made to act a second part in human affairs, or the rebellious vanity of our race imagine that either numbers, or capacity, or success, or power in arms, is aught more than a short-lived gift of His beneficence, to be resumed when His purposes are accomplished.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak: A Tale of the Pacific http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11573/11573-h/11573-h.htm (1847), Ch. XXX

God , People , World , Effort

“By turning my head slightly, I could see something out of the corner of my eye: it was a hand, the small white hand which slid along the table a little while ago. Now it was resting on its back, relaxed, soft and sensual, it had the indolent nudity of a woman sunning herself after bathing. A brown hairy object approached it, hesitant. It was a thick finger, yellowed by tobacco; inside this hand it had all the grossness of a male sex organ. It stopped for an instant, rigid, pointing at the fragile palm, then suddenly, it timidly began to stroke it. I was not surprised, I was only furious at the Self-Taught Man (L'Autodidacte); couldn't he hold himself back, the fool, didn't he realize the risk he was running?
The Self-Taught Man did not look surprised. He must have been expecting this for years. He must have imagined what would happen a hundred times, the day the Corsican would slip up behind him and a furious voice would resound suddenly in his ears. Yet he came back every evening, he feverishly pursued his reading and then, from time to time, like a thief, stroked a white hand or perhaps the leg of a small boy. It was resignation that I read on his face.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Fools , Sex , Boy , Time

“From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum. This hero, the product of Legionary education, will also know how to elaborate programs; will also know how to solve the Jewish problem; will also know how to organize the state well; will also know how to convince other Romanians; and if not, he will know how to win, for that is why he is a hero. This hero, this Legionary of bravery, labor, and justice, with the powers God implanted in his soul, will lead our Fatherland on the road of its glory.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), The Legion

God , People , World , Education

“…when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.”

K. Barry Sharpless (1941) American chemist

Nobel lecture, 2001

Way , Fish , Sea

“The Reason of the present Animadversions. …How far Hevelius has proceeded. That his instruments do not much exceed Ticho. The bigness, Sights and Divisions, not considerably differing. Ticho not ignorant of his new way of Division. …That so great curiosity as Hevelius strives for is needless without the use of Telescopic Sights, the power of the naked eye being limited. That no one part of an Instrument should be more perfect than another. …
That if Hevelius could have been prevail'd on by the Author to have used Telescopic Sights, his observations might have been 40 times more exact than they are.
That Hevelius his Objections against Telescopic sights are of no validity; but the Sights without Telescopes cannot distinguish a less angle then half a Minute.
That an Instrument of 3 foot Radius with Telescopes, will do more then one of 3 score foot Radius with common Sights, the eye being unable to distinguish. This is proved by the undiscernableness of spots in the Moon, and by an Experiment with Lines on a paper, by which a Standard is made of the power of the eye. …
A Conclusion of the Animadversions. That the learn'd World is obllig'd to Hevelius for what he hath done, but would have more, if he had used other instruments.
That the Animadvertor both contrived some hundreds of Instruments, each of very great accurateness for taking Angles, Levels, &c.; and a particular Arithmetical lnstrument for performing all Operations in Arithmetick, with the greatest ease, swiftness and certainty imaginable.
That the Reader may be the more certain of this, the Author describes an Instrument for taking Angles in the Heavens…”

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English natural philosopher, architect and polymath

Contents, Animadversions on the First Part of the Machina Coelestis of the Astronomer Johannes Hevelius https://books.google.com/books?id=KAtPAAAAcAAJ (1674)

World , Way , Time , Parting

“Now let's get talking: reefer madness. Like some arrogant government can't,
By any stretch of the imagination, outlaw a plant.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Evolve
Song lyrics

Madness

“That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Nature

“So much of acting is technical. Actually, I don’t want people to think that acting is technical, that you don’t need to have a rich fountain of emotional life and all those kinds of things, and know how to focus and concentrate and have good imagination and all of the other things that really make up an actor. One of the things they teach you, for example, in acting class is respond to your instinct, to your moment-to-moment instincts. If they just did that, they’d never get the shot, you know? Because you’d be walking all over… You’d be doing it differently every time. And the camera guys and the light guys, they need to know what you’re going to do. That’s what I mean by, if you just followed your instinct, or follow your impulses, which is what they say to you in acting class, you have to do that but you have to do it in a very confined window.”

Tobin Bell (1942) American actor

Interview: Tobin Bell Discusses His Career and His New Horror Film Dark House https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/interview-tobin-bell-discusses-his-career-and-his-new-horror-film-dark-house/ (March 14, 2014)

Life , People , Guy , Thinking

“You complain that no one can put himself in your place. I can imagine that it may never have occurred to you, preoccupied day and night with that thought, that you should comfort others: and he, the Comforter, he is the only one of whom it truly holds that no one could put himself in his place-how true if he had complained in that way! He, the Comforter, in whose place no one could put himself, he can put himself completely in your place and in every sufferer’s place. …. There is still one who is able to put himself completely in your place, the Lord Jesus Christ, who ”because he has suffered and himself been tempted is able to help those who are tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 119-120
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Way , Suffering , Help , Christ

“I can’t imagine,” said Dupre, “a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there’s no cause for alarm.”

Jack McDevitt book The Hercules Text

Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 9 (p. 132)

People , Way

“The odd thing is not that we are in the business of overthrowing other people's governments, but that we can still be surprised when somebody reminds us of it. In Asia, in Latin America, Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East we have been propping up and knocking down governments more or less openly for the past twenty-five years.
It is an established policy. Everybody knows it. It is supposed to be done covertly, which is only sensible if you hope to succeed since publicity in matters of this sort can only make the natives restless and defeat the project. Imagine the chauvinistic rallying around President Nixon that would have occurred if Canada, say, had announced that her agents were going to destabilize United States society so that discontented Americans could heave the Nixon Administration out of office.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Our Uncle Is Now Dorian Sam" (p.93)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

People , Hope , Business , Past

“Can the human appropriation of nature ever achieve the elimination of violence, cruelty, and brutality in the daily sacrifice of animal life for the physical reproduction of the human race? To treat nature "for its own sake" sounds good, but it is certainly not for the sake of the animal to be eaten, nor probably for the sake of the plant. The end of this war, the perfect peace in the animal world — this idea belongs to the Orphic myth, not to any conceivable historical reality. In the face of the suffering inflicted by man on man, it seems terribly "premature" to campaign for universal vegetarianism or synthetic foodstuffs; as the world is, priority must be on human solidarity among human beings. And yet, no free society is imaginable which does not, under its "regulative idea of reason," make the concerted effort to reduce consistently the suffering which man imposes on the animal world.”

Herbert Marcuse book Counterrevolution and Revolt

Source: Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Chapter "Nature and Revolution," in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, edited by Andrew Feenberg and ‎William Leiss, Beacon Press, 2007, pp. 240 https://books.google.it/books?id=JqoyBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA240-241

Life , War , World , Peace

“I have generally made it a rule to parry the inquiries and comparisons which the Americans are so apt to thrust at an Englishman. On one or two occasions, when the party has been numerous and worth powder and shot, I have, however, on being hard pressed, and finding my British blood up, found the only mode of allaying their inordinate vanity to be by resorting to this mode of argument:—"I admit all that you or any other person can, could, may, or might advance in praise of the past career of the people of America. Nay, more, I will myself assert that no nation ever did, and in my opinion none ever will, achieve such a title to respect, wonder, and gratitude in so short a period; and further still, I venture to allege that the imagination of statesmen never dreamed of a country that should in half a century make such prodigious advances in civilization and real greatness as yours has done. And now I must add, and I am sure you, as intelligent, reasonable men, will go with me, that fifty years are too short a period in the existence of nations to entitle them to the palm of history. No, wait the ordeal of wars, distresses, and prosperity (the most dangerous of all), which centuries of duration are sure to bring to your country. These are the test, and if, many ages hence, your descendants shall be able only to say of their country as much as I am entitled to say of mine now, that for seven hundred years we have existed as a nation constantly advancing in liberty, wealth, and refinement; holding out the lights of philosophy and true religion to all the world; presenting mankind with the greatest of human institutions in the trial by jury; and that we are the only modern people that for so long a time withstood the attacks of enemies so heroically that a foreign foe never put foot in our capital except as a prisoner (this last is a poser);—if many centuries hence your descendants will be entitled to say something equivalent to this, then, and not till then, will you be entitled to that crown of fame which the historian of centuries is entitled to award."”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to F. Cobden (5 July 1835) during his visit to the United States, quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), pp. 33-34.
1830s

Men , War , People , Age

“The ideologies of the super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway.
In civilized regions the super-tribes and the overgrown natural tribes created an astounding mental tyranny. In relation to his natural tribe, at least if it was small and genuinely civilized, the individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination. Along with his actual tribal kinsmen he might support a degree of true community unknown on Earth. He might in fact be a critical, self-respecting and other-respecting person. But in all matters connected with the super-tribes, whether national or economic, he behaved in a very different manner. All ideas coming to him with the sanction of nation or class would be accepted uncritically and with fervor by himself and all his fellows. As soon as he encountered one of the symbols or slogans of his super-tribe he ceased to be a human personality and became a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotyped reactions. In extreme cases his mind was absolutely closed to influences opposed to the suggestion of the super-tribe. Criticism was either met with blind rage or actually not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies. In this mood they would go to any extreme of self-sacrifice for the supposed glory of the super-tribe. Also they would show great ingenuity in contriving means to exercise their lustful vindictiveness upon enemies who in favorable circumstances could be quite as kindly and intelligent as themselves.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter V: Worlds Innumerable; 2. Strange Mankinds (p. 62)

Hate , Exercises , Intelligence , Communication

“I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

See: recording Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

People , Music , Quotes , Home

“Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Philip
8 1/2 Women

World , Water , Dependency

“I believe that most of us are too quick to name things when we are with small children. By simply naming a thing and letting it go at that when a child asks, "What is that?" we communicate that the name or label is the most important thing, that naming is sufficient. We deprive our children of their sense of wonder and discovery by labeling and categorizing things in the physical world. Instead of merely naming a tree, for example, try also guiding your child through an exploration of the tree both physically and mentally. This exploration may include touching, smelling, seeing from various angles, comparing one tree with another, imagining the inside of the tree and the parts underground, listening to the leaves, viewing the tree at different times of the day or during different seasons, planting its seeds, observing how other creatures — birds, moths, bugs — use the tree, and so on. After discovering that every object is fascinating and complex, a child will begin to understand that the label is only a small part of the whole. Thus taught, a child's sense of wonder will survive, even under our modern avalanche of words.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.239

Children , World , Communication , Understanding

“Ah! Silence is golden. When I was in my observatory at Belle-croix, I dared not move as the silence opened to me a course of discoveries. The families of the wood were then in action. It was the silence that permitted me, immovable as a tree trunk, to see the deer in their hiding-place and at their toilet, to observe the habits of the field rat, of the otter, of the salamander, those fantastic amphibious animals. He who lives in the silence becomes the center of a world; a little more and I could imagine myself the sun of a small creation, if my studies had not recalled to me that I had so much trouble to reproduce a poor tree or a cluster of rushes.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote recorded by fr:Alfred Sensier, in Souvenirs sur Rousseau, Paris, 1872; as cited in The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, etc., by D. C. Thomson; Scribner and Welford, New York 1890 – (copy nr. 78), p. 120
undated quotes

World , Family , Tree , Study

“We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 2.2
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

World

“I worried that my vegan diet might fail me. I worried that I'd run out of energy. I worried that the heat might prove too much. True, I wasn't as sore as I had been before going to a plant-based diet, and my recovery time was faster than ever. True, I almost never got congested, and whenever a cold or flu swept through Seattle, sending a lot of other runners to bed, I stayed healthy. And of course, I had battled Mount Si and prevailed, if a man could be said to prevail. I had also gone to California a week earlier and trained every day in the 100-degree canyons. But if you can imagine running 100 miles, you can imagine almost anything.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 11, p. 91

Time , Training

“Nothing can well be imagined more painful than the present position of woman, unless, on the one hand, she renounces all outward activity and keeps herself within the magic sphere, the bubble of her dreams; or, on the other, surrendering all aspiration, she gives herself to her real life, soul and body. For those to whom it is possible, the latter is best; for out of activity may come thought, out of mere aspiration can come nothing.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Life , Pain , Dreams , Soul

“It is the most wretched spectacle you can imagine. I won't fight for two reasons: firstly because I have no faith in waging war with guns and cannons, and it is not part of my creed. For ten years I have been fighting a war of wits. I would not be true to myself if I acted otherwise. Secondly, I have no weapons and I won't be persuaded. So you have nothing to fear where I am concerned”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

Quote from a letter to his parents, (June 1848); as cited 'Gustave Courbet', by Georges Riat, Parkstone International, 2015,
1840s - 1850s

War , Fear , Faith , Fight

“The true messianism of the Russian Church is not what the Slavophiles have imagined, but it is the example of suffering. It is in this way that she shows that she is the continuation of Christ in this world.”

Leonid Feodorov (1879–1935) Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church

Fr. Paul Maileux, "Exarch Leonid Feodorov," page 204.
Addressing a friend and confidant who was imprisoned with him at Solovki prison camp.

World , Way , Suffering , Christ

“Since these questions lie in the future, imagination must supply the lack of experienced feeling in attaching value to them. But values can be only imperfectly anticipated.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

Lie , Feeling , Question , Future

“Donkey Punch is a very extreme, real-world thriller – it’s about characters and events that are based in reality and it pushes them into very dark and extreme situations where they have to do things that they would never have imagined. The film shows all this quite realistically and doesn’t pull its punches.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Bloody Disgusting, Interview Donkey Punch: Writer/Directory Olly Blackburn, Mr. Disgusting, http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/441, 23 February 2012, 2011, Bloody-Disgusting LLC]

World , Reality

“The Rev. Mr. Hamilton, enjoying my dying agony in imagination, says: “Let the world wait but for a few years at the most, when Death’s icy fingers feel for the heartstrings of the boaster, and, as most of his like who have gone before him have done, he will sing another strain.” How shall I characterize the spirit that could prompt the writing of such a sentence? The reverend gentleman “loves his enemies,” and yet he is filled with glee when he thinks of the agonies I shall endure when Death’s icy fingers feel for the strings of my heart! Yet I have done him no harm.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Christmas Sermon (1890)

Love , Death , World , Feeling

“Clearly, heated reactions to the court or to its members are not unusual. Certainly, Justice Blackmun was attacked repeatedly because many disagreed, as I have, with the opinion he offered on behalf of the Court in Roe vs. Wade. Though I have joined opinions disagreeing with Justice Blackmun, I could not imagine ever being discourteous to him merely because we disagreed.”

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

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

Justice

“We no longer have political movements. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 3 : The Unbearable Lightness of Politics

War , Way , Effort , Change

“Wanting to obey Christ but lacking his imagination, we reinterpret the mission of the church through the only framework comprehendible to us--the one we've inherited from our consumer culture.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Christ

“They (i. e., the peasants) could imagine no future more grim than their past.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 86 (p. 575)

Past , Future

“I now imagine a quantum theoretician who may even admit that the quantum-theoretical description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems, but who, nevertheless, clings to the idea that the type of description of the statistical quantum theory will, in its essential features, be retained in the future. He may argue as follows: True, I admit that the quantum-theoretical description is an incomplete description of the individual system. I even admit that a complete theoretical description is, in principle, thinkable. But I consider it proven that the search for such a complete description would be aimless. For the lawfulness of nature is thus constituted that the laws can be completely and suitably formulated within the framework of our incomplete description.”

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

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949)

Law , Search , Idea , Nature

“People who say: 'Ah, this Beuys will go back to the middle ages, or to the stone dwellers, cliff dwellers.' No, there is a misunderstanding. I have nothing against the materialistic methodology of analytics, but I think we have to enlarge this thing, not to get caught in a very restricted one-sidedness in our way of looking towards life. Because the problems of life, soul, humankind's spirit, the problems of intuition, imagination, and inspiration, the problems of birth and death, the problems of survival in a bigger shape, and to bring in the image of the meaning of man.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1970's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1979, p. 249; Also cited in: Louwrien Wijers (1996). Writing as Sculpture: 1978 - 1987. p. 40

Life , Death , People , Age

“I think I can understand El Serruchito’s dismay. Imagine troubling yourself to attend some infant’s funeral, only to find dashed your modest poetic hopes.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

Five Years (2011)

Hope , Understanding , Thinking

“And the Tories now with their pitiful relaunch - oh, Michael Howard, we're supposed to have forgotten him from before, because he's had this Trinny & Susannah makeover; and you imagine them with him, saying, 'We think you'll like what we've done, Michael, just have a little look in the mirror - oh no, you can't really, can you? We've stitched you a lovely little shadow on - we think you'll really like that'… Ann Widdecombe's confused us all by going blonde - I was watching Question Time for half an hour, thinking Christ - Sue Barker's slapped on a bit of weight!”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Wrap up Warm tour, May 2004
Stand-up

Love , Question , Thinking , Time

“The utopias of a better world and a more just society have to do with words, with the generation of dreams, with imagination, with a very important identity that overcomes languages and is the identity of the human condition, to be able to recognize our own image in every fellow man, in a different age. I believe that the key to our time lies in this respect for diversity.”

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (1953) Argentine politician and ex President of Argentina

Speech A speech published in the web site of the Cervantes Virtual Center http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/congresos/rosario/clausura/fernandez_c.htm
Unsourced, 2007

Age , World , Dreams , Time

“Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards.”

Nicholas Metropolis (1915–1999) Greek American physicist

The beginning of the Monte Carlo method, published by [Necia Grant Cooper, Roger Eckhardt, Nancy Shera, From cardinals to chaos: reflections on the life and legacy of Stanislaw Ulam, CUP Archive, 1989, 0521367344, 125]

Suffering , Time

“Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 26 quoted in: Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations - Volume 1 (1999). p. 159

Communication , Animals

“I would like to offer an illustration. Imagine a house which is well designed from a material or practical point of view... Apart from these physio-functional demands, there are also psycho-functional demands which correspond with our optical, phonetic and tactile experiences. Until now, mankind has attempted to satisfy these 'supra-material' demands with a painting on the wall or a sculpture in a room.... the architecture of the future will have to destroy this duality. Its task will be to express completely and fulfill all our demands.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from Van Doesburg's unpublished writing, 'Fundamental principles', 1930; as cited in Theo van Doesburg, Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 203
1926 – 1931

Future , Painting , Housing

“It is not likely," remarked Joséphin Leclerc, "that the future will be such as you have seen it. I do not wish for the coming of socialism, but I dread it not. Collectivism at the helm would be quite another thing than is imagined. Who was it who said, carrying back his thoughts to the time of Constantine and of the Church's early triumphs : 'Christianity is triumphant, but its triumph is subject to the conditions imposed by life on all political and religious parties. All of them, whatever they may be, undergo so complete a transformation in the struggle that after victory there remains of themselves but the name and a few symbols of the last idea'?”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Source: The White Stone (1905), Ch. VI, p. 238

Life , Idea , Time , Future

“I had never dreamed of being a soldier; I had never fired a gun. I was not, nor ever had been, a fighter of any sort, but even so, I loved my country, and I spent much of that year trying to imagine a future distorted by war.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 5 Ira, p. 74
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Love , War , Dreams , Future

“Few men, I imagine, who become great started on their career with the intention of becoming so. The intention generally accompanies the unsuccessful. The secret of real greatness seems to be a happy knack of doing things as they come in your way; and they rarely present themselves in the form which careful preparation would enable you to deal with.”

Mandell Creighton (1843–1901) English historian and ecclesiastic

Heroes, address given to the Social and Political Education League (4 November 1898)

Men , Secret , Way , Happiness

“If you've got everybody collaborating on a mass scale; you can't be stopped. You can do anything, man. You can move mountains. If all the kids in this estate were a piecing, can you imagine what a beautiful place it would be?”

Goldie

Spraycan Art by Henry Chalfant & James Prigoff ISBN 0-500-27469-X

Beauty , Mountain

“Imagine what it's like to be a young person living in a country that is not moving toward reform… While your peers in other parts of the world have received educations that prepare them for the opportunities of a global economy, you have been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame others for your country's shortcomings.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)

World , Education , Parting , Personality

“Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science.”

Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) French physicist

[Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, second edition, Academic Press, New York, 1962, 0-48643-918-6, 308]

Problem , Science

“It is far from the truth to say that the rebellion was a communal riot, that the objective of the rebels was the destruction of Hindu religion and that the six months of rebellion were six months of anti-Hindu atrocities… All this, however, does not mean that religious fanaticism was totally absent in the rebellion. The numbers of forced conversions which did take place cannot by any stretch of imagination be explained by any other motive than religious fanaticism… One can and should, however, state explicitly that the main force behind the rebellion was not fanaticism which was simply a by-product…”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

On the issue of the Malabar rebellion
EMS as a historian

Truth , Religion , Communication , Motivation

“The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.”

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

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Life , Thinking , Future

“People are always talking about how bad the seventies were, but things in the popular culture have gotten much worse even since then. I grew up watching Laverne & Shirley, and Lenny and Squiggy never slept over. Now with shows like Friends or Married… with Children, sex is everywhere. I mean, can you imagine the minds that were raised on those shows?”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

America's Sexual Right Turn
Insight
1997-06-02
2010-09-15
Remembering Christine O'Donnell: Praising Helms, Missing Lenny and Squiggy, and Worries of Rampant Satanism
Kyle
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/remembering-christine-odonnell-praising-helms-missing-lenny-and-squiggy-and-worries-rampant-
2010-10-20

Children , People , Sex

“I don't mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn't criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it's a balance. And our job as actors is empathy. Our job is to imagine what someone else's life is like. And if you can't do that in real life, if you can't do that as a human being, then good luck as an actor…. I just think it's an important thing to engage in the world. And it's just too easy not to in our society.”

Natalie Portman (1981) Israeli-American actress

Inside the Actor's Studio interview by James Lipton, New School University, November 21, 2004 http://www.natalieportman.com/npcom.php?page_number=24&limit=100&view=

Life , People , World , Way

“Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 1: The Prince and the Pauper, p. 23

Children , Books

Quotes about imagination page 33

Quotes about imagination
page 33