“Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.”

“Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.”

“It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

“Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.”

“There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”

“Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.”

“Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.”

“In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities.”

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

“It speaks to our feelings and imaginations, as it were by suggestion; reaching for this very reason depths of our being quite beyond the power of mere words.”